Entertainment

Chew on this

It’s always tough when a family loses its father. But it’s especially difficult when that family’s made up of cannibals and the dad’s the one who finds the people they eat. That’s the quandary faced by the lower-class family in “We Are What We Are,” the first feature by Mexican writer-director Jorge Michel Grau.

The morbidly funny art-house horror tale opens with the middle-aged father coughing up blood and dying in a Mexico City shopping mall.

At the morgue, an attendant discovers an undigested human finger in the dead man’s stomach. “It’s shocking how many people eat each other in this city,” he tells an inept police detective, though Grau doesn’t explore the possibility of epidemic cannibalism.

The death leaves the deceased’s wife, two teenage sons and a daughter to fend for themselves. The task of shopping for dinner falls to the younger son, a closeted homosexual who finds victims among female hookers and gay hustlers.

“I’m not eating a fag,” the second son says when his bro brings home a guy he picked up in a gay club. “You’ll eat what I tell you to,” is the reply.

“We Are What We Are” has its grisly moments, for sure. But unlike Hollywood splatter-fests like “Saw,” it’s more than just senseless violence.

Grau’s script is intelligent, and it has something to say about family and social dysfunction. You just might want to skip meat for a few days.