[yasr_overall_rating]
After wandering a ruined city for years in search of food and shelter, two siblings find their way into one of the last remaining buildings. Inside, they find a man who will make them a dangerous offer to survive the outside world.
Some filmmakers gradually crawl their way to fame. Others announce their arrival with a hot film that breaks the mold. Emiliano Rocha Minter blares his entrance into the cinematic arena with the wickedly funny, absolutely deranged psychological drama/art-house/horror hybrid “We Are the Flesh.” It may not be for everyone, but those willing to stomach its dementia will be rewarded with a surprisingly thoughtful – albeit gruesome – existential study, anchored by an unforgettable central performance.
The opening shot – 45 seconds of a black screen and heavy breathing – sets the claustrophobic, desperate tone of pure agony and helplessness. Sweaty, filthy Mariano (Noé Hernández) mixes fuel in a rundown, post-apocalyptic Mexican apartment. He uses the most basic elements – bread, water, bucket, hose, fire – his lips curling in joy, as he immerses his hands into the mucus-like, viscous moonshine sludge, which later finds its way into his gullet.
He rips apart a table with brutal force and rage, to use the splinters for firewood. He beats a drum to death, breaks windows, smashes through furniture… He destroys things because they hold no more value, reflecting his own moral vacuum and sense of self-worth, but also because he’s reached the peak of depravity, where his own skin no longer feels safe.
When a young woman, Fauna (Maria Evoli) and her brother, Lucio (Diego Gamaliel) break in, having “wandered the city for days,” Mariano feeds them eggs and agrees to provide them with shelter. His psychedelic world and odd charisma begins to affect the new inhabitants. They rapidly fall under his crazed spell, leading to: a rather intense corruption of a vegetarian, death by ejaculation, an oral ingestion of menstrual fluids, an incestuous sex scene, cannibalism, brutal murder, and yes, necrophilia. Mariano becomes their God – or Satan, depending on how you look at it – in their own little h(e)aven – or more like a womb that they plaster and tape together, “the last monument of a rotten society.”
There are no soulful remnants in this grimy world, all of their humanity stripped down to “rotting meat.” Akin to the dilapidated environment – cave-like rooms, membrane-like windows and skeleton-like furniture – the characters devolve into mere shells of human beings, acting upon their most basic, animalistic desires and impulses. They fully embrace their darkest perversions, succumb to their demons, get lost in their subterranean nightmares. The final scene/twist powerfully reinforces those themes of humans essentially amounting to nothing more but heaps of sentient flesh, seeking solace from a corrupted world in the darkest recesses of their minds.
Sparse but focused, lyrical but lurid, profound but daringly in-your-face, the film is based on contradictions. Noé Hernández gives a similarly ambiguous performance of contrasts – the maniacal monster, cooped up for 47 years, beating away on his drum as he welcomes the morning sun vs. the sorrowful man, lost in his own city, in his own skin, spouting poetic monologs vs. the sick, manipulative pervert. “When you embrace solitude,” Mariano stammers, “your head spins around like crazy. And with every turn, you take more space in the void.” By turns menacing, deplorable, sad and weirdly sympathetic, Hernández is a force to be reckoned with. Evoli and Gamaliel are totally game too, by the way – particularly in the highly candid, infrared sex scene, which puts any 3-D ejaculation in Gaspar Noe’s “Love” to shame.
Running barely over an hour – which is a good thing, for I’m not sure how much of its artsy tendencies (a full minute of a character dancing naked in the mud, anyone?) and intensity audiences would be able to take – the film is both sparse and crammed with detail, contemplative and relentlessly brutal, confined to one location but somehow epic in scope, its themes and images resonating deeply. The scene of a National Anthem being sung right before a grisly demise of a helpless victim is not easily shaken.
Made on the cheap, Minter’s film utilizes some ingenious techniques to keep its vicious narrative propelling forward: the body horror is very Cronenberg; the frenzied, spinning camera shots bring to mind Noe’s “Enter the Void” and “Irreversible”; sustained periods of blackouts and an overall Dogme-like approach recall some of the ballsiest Lars von Trier choices; the perfect framing and silences, interspersed with assaultive musical cues, evoke Stanley Kubrick; the madness of isolation and a world constructed of your own consciousness scream Friedkin’s “Bug”; the last “party” sequence, scored to a bit of classical music, could be a nod to Ben Wheatley’s psychedelic oeuvre… The list of references goes on. If Minter cannibalizes those filmmakers’ techniques, he does so effectively – in a film that’s partially about cannibalism anyway.
Among its many influences, “We Are the Flesh” brings to mind Jim Mickle’s “We Are What We Are” and Pascal Laugier’s “Martyrs.” These films, like Minter’s horrific journey, transcended the torture-porn genre and elevated sadistic fare to borderline-spiritual meditations on what actually makes us human: our flesh, our agony, our sacrifices, our masochistic tendencies, the last dying embers of feeling, love. An end-of-year surprise that’s most certainly not for the faint of heart, “We Are the Flesh” may just rip yours out and eat it.
In theaters Friday, January 20th
