“Horror” is a surprisingly loose term in Hollywood nowadays – where one “Paranormal Activity” provides shocks and scares, “Insidious” focuses on the genre’s subtlety. Where a “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” reboot fails at its 3D, masked villain element, a “Scary Movie” sequel fails with monsters more Charlie Sheen-like in appearance.
“We Are What We Are” takes a different stance by mixing some of the original stances. Namely, the subtlety made popular by recently acclaimed films such as “The Conjuring,” and a strange premise backed by an analysis on human sociology that is “The Purge”-esque.
The quiet, small-town setting of “We Are What We Are,” a remake of a 2010 Mexican horror film that leans more toward the shock approach, focuses on the Parkers. It’s immediately apparent that something isn’t right with the Parkers, starting with the spontaneous death of the mother in the film’s cold opening.
Post-title sequence, the Parkers live their lives in a successfully unexplained environment. The two teenage daughters (Ambyr Childers and Julia Garner) must rise to be the maternal figures of their household. This involves both taking care of their younger brother (Jack Gore), too young to understand the inner workings of his elders, and the family’s rituals, which go about in mysterious cult-like fashion.
Their father (Bill Sage) leads the act with a forceful hand. Secluding his children from mainstream society and foregoing their interaction with the outside world to keep to the family’s plan, he quietly lurks around the film’s more emotional moments to demand things go as intended.
Director Jim Mickle controls a rainy weekend’s ambiance as though he intended to be the movie’s true villain. Haunting cinematography of rain-soaked leaves falling wistfully into a flooding creek keep the transitions running smoothly alongside their accompanying grayscale scenes inside and around the house.
More so, Mickle clearly understands the atmosphere he is intending to evoke. The Parker family members barely smile during the film, and when they do, it’s for an irrelevantly brief amount of time. Yet the daughters keep their humanizing composure through the most daunting, sometimes horrifying moments. The son retains a childlike curiosity when confronting the “monster” in the family’s basement.
“We Are What We Are” creepily goes along the course of its weekend-long tale like a spider spinning its web, slowly revealing further details about the Parkers’ secrets with a foreboding tone. Though it isn’t without its surprises – a few local cops who find small bones in the nearby creek become increasingly suspicious of the family, who initially appear to innocently keep to themselves. Excerpts read from a diary passed forward to the daughters provide flashbacks that carefully unveil details of a plot much darker than it seems.
The film’s ending, a solid 15 minutes of thematically climactic action resulting in a surprisingly unpredictable conclusion, solidifies the film as a success, albeit a weird success. Where most horror films rely on unpredictability throughout to frighten audiences, “We Are What We Are” chooses to go for one fell swoop of disgusting the mind.
It’s only at this moment that Mickle reveals his true intention, the thematic message lying beneath the 100-minute horror study. Everything depicted is seemingly real, or otherwise convincingly plausible. There are no spirits, no ghosts, no vampires hiding among the living.
The setting is true, and the reality occasionally deceiving, but the message is simple: “We are what we are,” whether human or grasping to humanity, average or weird. Though in Mickle’s case, mostly weird.