Extreme cinema has its purpose, usually to tell a story in the most shocking manner to get a visceral response as we watch. While some directors use it for pure shock value, others reject the formulaic films cranked out of the incessant Hollywood machine. Some feel that extreme representation of brutality, sexuality, and gore is the only way to express themselves and their subject matter artistically. In We Are The Flesh (Tenemos la Carne), a film that played many festivals, including Cannes in 2016, and is now a Shudder Exclusive, Mexican director Emiliano Rocha Minter gives us all of the above and more to tell a meandering story about death, rebirth and god complexes.
Lucio (Diego Gamaliel) and Fauna (Maria Evoli) stumble upon an abandoned building and its sole inhabitant, an elf-like man named Marciano (Noé Hernández). He is strange and extremely volatile, spouting cryptic words about his way of life. Fauna bargains for her and her brother to stay with him in exchange for any sort of arrangement since they seek refuge from a harsh environment on the outside. That arrangement turns out to be labor to create a womb-like labyrinth of a cave with bits of wood, cardboard, broken furniture, and endless rolls of tape. As he gets to know his two young captives locked in the building with him, he is taken with Fauna and bullies her brother. In a series of extremely strange and increasingly cruel events, he forces them to do his darkly incestuous bidding. Once they cross the line, they enter an infernal world of raw emotion and mysticism.
We Are The Flesh wins hands down for the title of extreme cinema. Viewers beware as this film is chockfull of writhing nudity, incest, rape, cannibalism, orgies, and even a dash of menstrual blood, letting it all hang out to tell a strange story with creationist undertones in an absurdist and grotesque manner. Adam and Eve, the devil, a God/Jesus/resurrection theme, and Mexico’s nationalistic unrest are explored but go off the rails just as you start making sense of the startling action. Hernández gave a truly arresting performance as the demonic Marciano and Evoli reached deep for her portrayal of Fauna. Minter sounded very supportive of his cast from his interviews, but I’m not sure how he got these performances out of his actors. If the process was anything like Isabelle Adjani’s motivation in Possession, I hope they had a therapist on set.
Only in his mid-twenties, Minter, lauded and backed by Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, has been compared to French director Gaspar Noé. While films like Noé’s Love also used extreme sexuality to tell a story, once you get past the sex, it reveals itself to be a sensitive film about a vulnerable young man searching for lost love. I actually found We Are The Flesh had more in common with Michael Rowe’s 2010 film Leap Year (Año bisiesto). This, too, was filled with stark and graphic sex. Still, like Minter, Rowe uses sex, sadism, and isolation as a way to convey a connection; in this instance, humanity and heartache as a lonely young woman finds solace in a sadistic relationship. Leap Year is also similar to We Are The Flesh due to a brother and sister relationship and an overbearing older male that dictates to, or has the potential to lord over, a young woman, but that’s where the similarities end.
Where Rowe creates a quiet intensity, Minter juxtaposes poetic dialogue with brutally animalistic actions that come at you full force. The characters are unfettered and wild, giving into impulse after impulse in a womb-like setting, punctuated with a barrage of sound. Actions like breathing, stirring, and sporadic and aggressive drumming pulls the viewer’s focus, making each scene that much more uncomfortable as you wince from both the visual and aural assault. There were also nods to Samuel Beckett along with colorful psychedelic and supernatural elements. Those connections still didn’t make it more accessible to me, perhaps only categorizing familiar scenes.
I appreciate some extreme cinema for what it attempts to overcome in this age of banal cookie-cutter genre films (as long as living creatures-human and animal- remain unharmed in real life), but ultimately I can’t say I liked We Are The Flesh. Perhaps I’m not intellectual enough to grasp the abundance of allegorical notions presented here, since some things become too much of a stretch for me to consider them above their shock value.
One viewer’s interpretation of art is another viewer’s headache. Are Lucio and Fauna a new hope in a barren land? Is Marciano their god or a demon? Does an abducted soldier represent a violently dying motherland or an attempt to rid the country of political overseers? Is this an ultimately extreme art film instead of a horror? Who’s to say, but those questions and more will come to mind as you watch Emiliano Rocha Minter’s chaotic, poetic, and ultimately confusing first feature film We Are The Flesh. After this experience, he’s certainly on my radar, and I’m curious to see what he does next. Make up your own mind and see it exclusively on Shudder.
(Edited from an original post published September 2017 on Rosemary’s Pixie).
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