Movie Review: We are what we are (2013)

 

Directed by: Jim Mickle

Starring: Bill Sage, Michael Parks, Ambyr Childers, Julia Garner, Jack Gore and Kelly McGillis


As with a lot of movies it’s best not to know all the details. So if you’re just like me and want to be surprised by a movie, please don’t read this review.

As mentioned above I was pleasant surprised by this movie. Didn’t see any trailer. Just the poster. If you’re a horror fan and you look at the poster, one thing immediately comes to mind: Bill Sage has an awesome beard. To start off hooray for Bill Sage. This indie-actor has been a favourite of mine in movies like Mysterious Skin, American Psycho and many Hal Hartley film, the latter are definitely no horror movies, but if you are in to indie comedy’s, check out Hal Hartley, serious, I beg off you.

But on with the review.
The movie starts on a rainy Friday. We see a woman in a remote house at the end of town. She decides to go to the butcher to get some meat. While she is walking back to her car she starts to feel sick and coughs up some black slime. Then she fall back, hits her head and drowns in a pool of rain.
We cut back to the house where we meet her two daughters (one is 14 and the other around 2 years older) and son (around 6). They look pale and when the boy states that he’s hungry, but the sisters say they are not eat anything, because God says they have to fast. The father (Sage) is in the shed outside and is fixing watches. After he leaves his shed, the police arrives to bring them the bad news.
The family is devastated with the dead of their wife and mother, but don’t really open up to other people. They stay very reluctant and you feel that there is something wrong with this family. The father keeps quoting his own biblical lines, and the children just wander through the house.

In the other part of town Doc Barrow (Parks) is doing an autopsy on the body of the mother and notices some weird implication and he thinks it was the start of early Parkinson’s disease. Later as he is walking with his dog, he’s finds a piece of bone near the creek. He goes to the Sherriff for help, but he thinks it’s nothing. The Doc’s daughter and several other girls had gone missing of the years, so he has his doubts.

The movie depicts it’s subject matter very slowly. In the first few moment when you meet the whole family, you know something is wrong. And very soon you know you were right. The setting of the movie is very beautiful, nature plays a big part in this movie. This is a movie that works because of the constant tension, instead of gore. Don’t get me wrong there are some stomach turning scenes in here that can be hard to swallow. But overall it plays more like an Hitchcock or Terrence Malick film. The performances are downright excellent, Bill Sage shines as an intense figure with a lot of inner demons and his temper goes from unsettling to brutal. The children are also very good, you really believe their strong bound. As much as I love Michael Parks, he is good in this movie, but I found his character pretty standard.

This movie was written by Jim Mickle and Nick Damici, who also made the indie-horror, Stakeland. But movies show great quality and tackle horror movies in such a way that it stays fresh. There seems to be a good deal of director’s coming up these last few years like Ti West (House of the Devil), Adam Wingard (You’re Next) and Ben Wheatley (Kill List), just to name a few, who make these interesting low budget horror movies with great scripts.

Last note:
At the end of the movie I saw this was actually a remake of a Mexican film with the same name. But after some research I think that it’s more an reimagining than a full on remake. So both movies could be enjoyed in their own merit.



+Beautiful setting and stunningly photographed
+Bill Sage performance
+Slow tension build up


-Michael Parks’ character
-You see the plot coming


Overall

4 out of 5