October 3 - 9, 2013
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villager arts & entertainment “We Are” serves up gore, and food for thought Mickle’s remake a rare horror film for adults FILM WE ARE WHAT WE ARE
Written by Nick Damici & Jim Mickle Directed by Jim Mickle Rated R 1 hour, 40 minutes At Landmark Sunshine Cinema 143 East Houston St. (btw. First & Second Aves.) For screening times, call 212-260-7289
BY SEAN EGAN Jim Mickle’s newest feature, “We Are What We Are,” is a strange and contradictory beast. Though ostensibly a horror movie, one could mistakenly take the film for just another dark family drama — at least its first half. While technically a remake of Mexican director Jorge Michel Grau’s 2010 film of the same name, it differentiates itself enough from its source material to become almost unrecognizable from the original. By taking an outlandish concept which practically begs to be portrayed campily, and treating it with deadly seriousness, the “remake” distinguishes itself as one of the greatest horror movies in recent memory. Working from a skeletal outline of the original’s plot, director Mickle and coscreenwriter Nick Damici transplant the action to the Catskills, during a period of intense storms. The film concerns the Parker family, who are set adrift after their mother suddenly drops dead of a mysterious ailment. Despite this loss, family patriarch Frank Parker (Bill Sage) insists his eldest daughter Iris (Ambyr Childers) assume his late wife’s duties, in order for the family proceeds with their traditional observance of the upcoming “Lamb’s Day” — a dark ritual that involves unspeakable acts. While the Parker clan prepares for their grisly festivities, a local doctor with a personal motive (Michael Parks) investigates clues brought
Photo courtesy of the filmmakers & distributor
Julia Garner and Ambyr Childers star as sisters with a dark secret, in “We Are What We Are.”
out by the storm, which bring him closer to discovering the Parker’s secrets. While this story has the makings of a pulpy thriller, Mickle wisely treats the material seriously. The film unfolds slowly and deliberately, allowing room for the characters and their world to be established, without Mickle ever overplaying his hand and revealing too much about the secrets to come. Cinematographer Ryan Samul captures the gorgeously melancholy grays, greens and earth tones of the foggy, rain soaked Catskills in addition to the darkness of the Parker’s home, which hearkens back to olden times. Though there is gore, as well as a couple of effective scares, the emphasis of “We Are What We Are” is placed more on its
moody, contemplative atmosphere. Mickle has clearly made a mature horror film for adult audiences, filled with prodding questions on the nature of man and man’s capacity for evil — and his direction makes this distinction clear. Understandably then, Mickle and Damici’s screenplay is not as concerned with corporeal horror as much as it is with the underlying cause of it — the domestic horrors of misguided religious fervor. This concept is embodied by Sage’s Frank Parker, a formidable presence that dominates the film. Sage plays Frank as an intimidating, mumbling, Bible-quoting patriarch with almost total control of his family, who seem to love him and fear him in equal measure. Unremorseful and even proud of the violent
atrocities he’s committed and the trouble he’s put children through in the name of his ancestral faith (a relatively nebulous faith largely drawn from a pioneer-era journal and Christian Fundamentalism), he is a true figure of destruction and evil, and a damning portrait of religion gone awry. The film might get too heavy and unpleasant to bear, were it not for the efforts of the other actors in the cast, who are across-the-board stellar. Childers performance makes Iris’ internal struggle both sympathetic and terrifying in equal measure. Even better is Julia Garner as the younger daughter, Rose — a fragile, pale presence whose existential quandaries and
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