Reviewing We Are the Flesh from writer/director Emiliano Rocha Minter is tricky. On the one hand, it’s a deeply flawed film aimed at a limited audience. It’s transgressive in the extreme, sexually explicit bordering on pornographic, nonsensical bordering on pretentious. Minter seems to want to find that sliver of an audience that loves high-brow art house movies as much as they love sordid exploitation trash. Characters are reduced to character types and symbols, which themselves get reduced to the most base animalistic impulses (i.e., eat, f**k, repeat).
And yet this is why I can’t get We Are the Flesh out of my head. No wonder Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men, Gravity) and Alejandro Inarritu (Birdman, The Revenant) have endorsed Minter’s filmmaking. It might speak to the way that extreme cinema, even irresolvable or seemingly incomplete (maybe incomprehensible?) works, can affect viewers simply through a lack of restraint. It’s like staring at a squalid ink blot and trying to discern meaning and intent, knowing that this shape may be nothing more than sound, fury, sex, and gore.
[This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. It has been reposted to coincide with the theatrical release of the film.]
TRAILER IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK (NSFW)
We Are the Flesh (Tenemos le carne)
Director: Emiliano Rocha Minter
Rating: NR
Release Date: January 13, 2017 (limited)
Country: Mexico
We Are the Flesh reminds me of early Clive Barker splatterpunk stories; one scene in thermal vision even recalls Barker’s little-seen short film The Forbidden. There’s also a hint of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, though it’s shorn of the technological madness and kinetic stuff–this transgression is luridly organic. Maybe Tetsuo by way of Gaspar Noe, with occasional outbursts of hysterical excess straight out of Andrzej Zulawski (Possession). The film also has some moist, mucus-rich makeup effects that wouldn’t be out of place in a Brian Yuzna movie (Society, From Beyond). This paragraph is either a warning or a recommendation–if you want blood, you got it.
There’s a man with a demonic smile (Noe Hernandez) who lives in an abandoned building. He gets high on homemade gasoline and gets off on solitude. A boy (Diego Gamaliel) and a girl (Maria Evoli), siblings, enter his building. They’re desperately in search of food and shelter. The man lets them stay as long as they help him construct a claustrophobic landscape within the building. Think of something like a cave and a uterus complete with a pseudo birth canal; a psychoanalytic hellscape where the id can thrive. All the while, the man tries to coerce the boy and the girl to break social, sexual, and interpersonal taboos.
Minter builds up dread through whispers and shouts as he mounts transgressions upon each other. There’s incest, rape, murder, cannibalism, on-camera sex, and necrophilia, and even now I can’t say what it all adds up to. We Are the Flesh may not add up to anything, to be honest. Even though Hernandez and Evoli give the film their all–Evoli in particular goes for psychotic broke–the movie may just be images and noise with the intent to shock. I think there’s a political allegory about Mexico and poverty, that a lack of means reduces us to some base state of nature in which social mores no longer matter. But it’s a bit of a guess. It might be a stretch. Sometimes extreme cinema is just extreme cinema, but I can’t help but sense something more meaningful behind all of this given how repulsed yet affected I felt. When someone lets out a blood-curdling scream, there has to be a reason, right? Maybe? Or was it just the desire to scream?
This struggle for meaning is probably an intentional provocation from Minter. When confronted with something shocking, I usually feel challenged to interpret it. Yet Minter evades overt meaning making. There seems to be 10 minutes missing from the final act of the 80-minute film. Several events take place off camera unexplained, and it leads to total narrative disorientation. We Are the Flesh was a feverish nightmare already, and then that skimpy dream logic breaks down completely. No order, not for this this movie. What Minter provides is a sustained sense of unease, however. That feeling remained with me even after a less than satisfying conclusion.
Even if We Are the Flesh only prompts exasperation and disgust, it’s such a strange trip into the abyss I want to send others down there into the dark who are willing. Minter, like or hate it, is a Mexican filmmaker to watch. I’m reminded of something Clive Barker said about movies once (paraphrased): I want to feel something, even if it’s just disgust; better that than thinking, okay, let’s go for a pizza. After We Are the Flesh, pizza was the last thing I wanted.
