We Are What We Are movie review (2013)

Set in a remote small town outside of the Catskill Mountains, the film centers on the Parkers, a fairly reclusive but otherwise normal-seeming family that, as the story opens, is marked by tragedy when the matriarch dies in a tragic accident brought on by a massive rainstorm. This is horrible enough but to make things worse, it is just about time for them to go through a religious ritual that has been performed in the family for a couple of centuries and which can only be done by the woman of the house. Oh yeah, the ritual in question involves cannibalism.

Reeling from his wife's death, domineering father Frank (Bill Sage) insists on pressing ahead and goes out the night of his wife's death to bring back a not-so-willing volunteer to manacle in the basement in preparation for the ceremony. On the other hand, teenage daughters Iris (Ambyr Childers) and Rose (Julia Garner) are not quite as enthused with the responsibilities that have suddenly been forced upon them. What the Parkers don't realize is that their ghastly secrets are in danger of being revealed by the police, a curious neighbor (Kelly McGillis) and a local doctor (Michael Parks) whose daughter was a Parker house entree. Even Mother Nature gets into the act, as the torrential rains begin to uncover skeletal evidence of unspeakable crimes.

If this plot sounds slightly familiar to you, it may be because "We Are What We Are" is a remake of a 2010 Mexican film that received a bit of acclaim among horror film fans. I never got a chance to see that film but from what I understand, co-writers Jim Mickle and Nick Damici (the former also directed) have taken the basic premise and then played around with it in a number of ways. The key change, so I hear, is that the genders of the key characters have been switched around—in the original, it was the father who died, the mother who encouraged her brood to carry on and a son who found himself forced to carry on the unspeakable tradition. I also hear that in that version, the keeping of the tradition was driven by socio-economic factors instead of misplaced religious fervor.