Peter Bradshaw 

We Are What We Are review – ‘Reduces the original to ordinary genre horror’

This US version of Mexican director Jorge Michel Grau satirical nightmare junks pretty much everything but the title and the basic idea, writes Peter Bradshaw
  
  

We Are What We Are (2013)
Dumbed down … Jim Mickle's remake of We Are What We Are. Photograph: IFC Films/Everett/Rex Photograph: IFC Films/Everett/Rex

When Mexican director Jorge Michel Grau released his movie Somos Lo Que Hay, or We Are What We Are, in 2010 – a macabre satirical nightmare about cannibalism – I predicted it would get an English-language remake, and the title would be It Tastes Like Chicken. Sadly the second thing didn't come to pass. Maybe the first thing didn't either. This new US version from screenwriter Nick Damici and director Jim Mickle junks pretty well everything but the title and the basic idea. Grau's angry, complex movie about hunger, poverty and family dysfunction has been dumbed down into an ordinary genre horror with franchise possibilities – though it is well enough made on that basis. Grau's subversive proposal that cannibalism is a symptom of something horrible and psychologically plausible has been travestied, (the cause is here disclosed in some silly 18th-century flashbacks) and the makers of this movie have failed to understand what made the first one interesting. In the original, the people-eating took place in the big city where the bodies of the poorest wouldn't be missed. Here, it's supposed to happen in a smalltown community where of course they are missed: local cops have, however, just a handful of missing persons on their books, though you would presumably need to kill someone every couple of weeks to feed a cannibal family of five. Another pointless remake.

 

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