We Are What We Are (2013)

Jim Mickle did not want to direct a remake, which is the sort of detail that makes a critic feel a small, unearned kinship with the man. He did it anyway, transplanting the 2010 Mexican original to the Catskill Mountains, where the Parker family keeps to ancient customs, a locked shed, and a period of ritual fasting that no neighbor has been invited to inspect. A torrential downpour does the heavy lifting of the plot, washing a bone fragment into a creek and the family matriarch into a ditch. The rain is weather. It is not a sermon, and there is no drowned polar bear in the frame. We should be grateful for small mercies.

The Parkers eat people. This is presented as a family tradition, observed with prayer and scripture and a certain grim domesticity, and the film's real interest lies in two daughters, Iris and Rose, who inherit the duty when their mother dies. They butcher a captive at their father's command, then eventually turn on him, tearing into the old man with their teeth. A case can be made for a patriarchal-rebellion arc, sisters seizing the rite and destroying the patriarch who imposed it. The case is modest. The film treats this as horror first and allegory second, and it never stops to explain itself.

Critics at the time called it an indictment of religious extremism, of brainwashing and poison visited upon innocent souls, and that reading is available. The film merely declines to argue. It sits in the dread and lets the audience draw the conclusion. No racial themes, no class critique, no environmental message, no representation of any kind beyond the standard-issue white family in a farmhouse. Kelly McGillis appears as a kindly vegetarian neighbor, the closest thing to a value system the film offers, and she is killed for it. The whole affair is a grim, well-made exercise in atmosphere, and its social content amounts to a raised eyebrow. We classify it accordingly.