Tag Archives: Wyatt Russell

Breaking Free From Trauma in ‘We Are What We Are’

November is often considered a time for family, traditional meals, and being thankful for what you have in life. What better way to celebrate this than with a Uterus Horror film featuring a family of cannibals? That film is 2013’s We Are What We Are. It has everything audiences could want: an unraveling family with a dark secret, a yearly ritualistic feast with the other-other white meat, and the coming-of-age story of two sisters trying to break free of their generational trauma. 

We Are What We Are is a remake of the 2010 Mexican film of the same name, but while that version followed two brothers, this one follows a pair of sisters. Based on the screenplay by Jorge Michel Grau, this version of the story was written by Nick Damici (Stake Land) and Jim Mickle (Sweet Tooth), with the latter also directing the film. We Are What We Are tells the story of the Parkers, a deeply religious family of five living in a small town. On the first day of their yearly ritualistic fast, before a particularly special meal, the mother has a mysterious medical episode that leads to her untimely death. This event, as well as days of heavy rains flooding the area, threaten to expose a centuries-long family secret.

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The living members of the family are Iris (Ambyr Childers), Rose (Julia Garner), Rory (Jack Gore), and their father, Frank (Bill Sage). It’s not entirely clear how old Iris is, but we know she is out of high school, while Rose is 14 years old, and Rory is just a little boy. Although Frank is the patriarch of the family, it seems most of the responsibilities had fallen to his wife. With her gone, those responsibilities go to Iris as she’s the eldest daughter. This first becomes evident when Iris and Rose are forced to go identify their mother’s body. They go together, but Doc Barrow (Michael Parks) states he only needs one person to take on the task. Iris volunteers to shield her younger sister from having to see their mother in death. 

Following their mother’s passing, Iris and Rose debate whether they should continue their family’s annual tradition. Rose even consults her father, but it’s clear there’s no swaying him. After their mother’s funeral, Frank gives Iris a journal dating back to 1781. This journal belonged to an ancestor of theirs who first settled in the area. In the journal, a young girl recounts the hardships her family had endured when first arriving, unable to find suitable food to survive. The father and uncle leave to find food, but only the father returns with fresh meat in hand. 

The girl’s mother dies of starvation and exposure, leaving the girl with her younger brother and religious father. As the father begins to lose his mind, it becomes clear to the girl that her family’s survival is now her burden. When she discovers her father has their mother’s body in the back of a cave, already partly butchered, he hands his daughter the knife to continue the work, which she readily accepts. This event becomes known in the Parker family as “Lambs Day” and is the beginning of their yearly fast, followed by the consumption of human flesh. 

Even though the audience only sees the Parker family dynamics over the course of a few days, it establishes the various roles they all play. We Are What We Are makes it clear that Frank is in charge. He is the head of the household, and whatever he says goes. This likely stems from upholding the tradition begun by their ancestors in the 1700s, as well as the links between the Parker traditions and their deep-seated religious beliefs. Frank wouldn’t let his wife see a doctor for her headaches, nor would he let his sick son see a doctor. He is also the one who decides to keep the Parker rituals alive. But despite all this, Frank is never seen doing any actual work. In addition to forcing his daughters to identify their mother’s body, he also forces them to murder an innocent woman and butcher her for their ritualistic feast. 

This dynamic has clearly been in place since the first Parker family settled in 1781, but Iris and Rose want better for themselves and their little brother. Rose is certainly more vocal about her desire to stop killing and consuming innocent people, but Iris does not necessarily feel the same way. Iris is simply doing her best to hold the family together and help them survive, just as her ancestors did. It isn’t until Iris and Rose have to kill for the first time that Iris sees they cannot continue as they had. While all of this is happening with the family, Doc Barrow begins investigating human bones unearthed by the flood waters. Even though the sheriff is uninterested, Barrow enlists the help of the new deputy, Anders (Wyatt Russell), who happens to be Iris’ old flame. As Anders gets close to the truth, Iris at first attempts to convince him nothing is going on, and the two begin to have sex, but it’s cut short when Frank shows up and kills Anders. He calls his daughter filth before sending her home so he can dispose of the body. 

Knowing the family secret is coming out, Frank decides to put arsenic in the family dinner to kill himself and his children. His plans are temporarily thwarted when Rose discovers his intentions, and Barrow shows up to confront Frank. A fight ensues, but ultimately Frank incapacitates Barrow and wrangles his children back to the dinner table to die. Yet Rose and Iris have a much stronger will to live. They attack their father, biting into him and devouring him alive. Finally free of Frank’s tyranny, Iris, Rose, and Rory pack up and leave to start a fresh life.

The Uterus Horror journey throughout We Are What We Are brings up interesting perspectives on generational trauma, religion, and even the more animalistic side of human nature. While they are different ages and at different stages of development, Iris and Rose go on this journey together. The responsibility transfers from their mother to Iris, but Rose is there with her sister every step of the way. Both young women take on the role of mother in the household. They cook, clean, raise Rory, and of course, must butcher innocent people. 

Having their mother around to protect them sheltered the daughters from the trauma, but with their mother gone, Iris and Rose come face-to-face with the harsh reality of what their family is. They are old enough and smart enough to understand that tradition is wrong. They want more for themselves and their little brother. For the original Parker family, consuming human flesh was a matter of survival. Over the generations, it was bastardized and turned into a yearly ritual directly connected to the family’s deep Christian faith. By going through with this ritual, they believe “all sins are forgiven in the eyes of the lord.” To Iris and Rose, it is a curse rather than a blessing.

Frank’s final moments are an important part of Iris and Rose’s growth. An animal — human or otherwise — will go to great lengths to survive. That’s how the whole tradition started, with a family on the brink of death trying to live through a harsh and unforgiving winter. Eating humans no longer makes any sense because it’s not needed for survival. That is until Rose and Iris eat Frank. Their father was the greatest threat to the family’s survival. If they did nothing, Iris, Rose, and Rory would have died alongside him. Attacking and eating Frank was like the desperate act of a wild animal, killing the predator before they became the prey. In a way, it gives Frank what he wanted: for the family to continue their deranged tradition. Without him, Iris and Rose can escape to live the life they choose and raise their younger brother free of religious oppression and trauma. 

We Are What We Are is a haunting piece of Uterus Horror. It depicts two young women on the same journey, although at slightly different times in their development. Their transformation is entirely internal as they end the vicious cycle that has gone on for generations, throwing away everything they have ever known to find a better way of life. This is different from the Uterus Horror films previously examined, most of which depict the person on their journey as being completely alienated from everyone they love. If Iris and Rose didn’t have each other, their story could have ended up quite differently. Together, they break their cycle of horror, something no one in their family had the strength to do in over 200 years.

‘Overlord’ Is Still a Nazi-Killing Good Time

If a movie is released with dismal marketing and appalling timing, was it even released? It’s a twist on an old philosophical question that has an easy answer. Just as we are arrogant enough to speculate that human perception determines an event’s significance and the shape of the universe itself, simply assuming a movie like Julius Avery’s Overlord has no value is indicative of what kind of movies the industry deems worth investing in. 

That said, it’s not difficult to see why Avery’s sophomore feature came and went without much notice despite more than generous reviews that nevertheless fell short of widespread acclaim. Overlord is a genre mashup that contains a whole lot of elements that are more than familiar, as a light description of the plot would evoke visions of Castle Wolfenstein to any self-respecting gamer. Perhaps Variety’s Amy Nicholson had something of a point when she wrote that fans of said game might just “find themselves reaching for the controls out of habit.”

But Overlord isn’t trying to reinvent schlock. In the film, a diverse(ish) group of good American soldiers are shot out of the sky on their way to destroy a radio tower in a small French village so D-Day can continue. The bedraggled handful of survivors are committed to finishing their mission in the Nazi-occupied hamlet, only to discover that the Germans are conducting some grisly experiments on the locals, and their zombifying efforts may pay off to the detriment of the entire world. 

Nothing new to see here, but audiences were nevertheless ripe and ready for a tale of good versus evil sans complications when America was firmly on the side of good in a righteous crusade. Overlord was released in 2018, a time period most of us would likely rather block out — right in the midst of the Trump presidency. The year before, white supremacists grabbed tiki torches and charged through Charlottesville, and even the most oblivious were being forced to reckon with many of the darker undercurrents of American society, which were grossly at odds with the country’s self-proclaimed image as of a shining beacon of freedom.

Why Overlord was pushed from its initial October release to November — thus removing it from all the potential benefits of the Halloween-themed box office — likely flows directly from those undercurrents. The movie’s surrogate everyman is Edward Boyce (Jovan Adepo), a Black man whose mastery of French can be traced to his Haitian grandmother and is a mere three months removed from civilian life.  Avery’s B-movie sensibilities also mostly dispense with the American brand of racism and leave that kind of thing to the Nazis, and Boyce’s fellow soldiers are the kind of variety that could be loosely referred to as inclusive. For the most part, they remain firmly likable, with hardened explosives expert Lewis Ford (Wyatt Russell) the only outlier that could approach being the exception to the rule.

But a distinctive style often makes all the difference, and Avery brings in the action, quickly introducing the major and very distinctive characters in Boyce’s paratrooper squad. Audiences barely have time to wonder who’s going to be on the perhaps literal chopping block before Avery obliterates nearly all of them in a thrillingly chaotic sequence that would make Sam Raimi proud. We’re enmeshed right into Boyce’s viewpoint as the plane is shot to bits, with bullets and vomit alike flying as he parachutes from a chaotically war-torn sky into the water, cutting himself out of his parachute just in time to inhale a desperate gasp of air in the midst of the watery debris.

It’s electrifying stuff, with survivors pared down yet again by German night patrols and landmines by the time they reach the village and meet the token girl, Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier). Chloe resides with her ailing aunt and adorable eight-year-old brother Paul (Gianny Taufer), because having him be her son would mean she was (shudder) older than many of the soldiers who use her home as a would-be rallying point while they try and complete their mission.

The human element partners well with the gleefully dark gore – the standout is when Boyce sneaks into the church and discovers what the Nazis have been up to. It’s a nearly wordless sequence, and Adepo is all wide-eyed terror and grimly focused determination as he discovers a talking, disembodied head and spine, moaning creatures locked away in cells, and liquid-filled sacks with people fast on their way to being transformed into something inhuman. 

Boyce’s vulnerability hardly needs to be stated since his Blackness in Nazi Germany eschews disguise as any kind of option. Yet he manages to not only escape but rescue Jacob Rosenfeld (Dominic Applewhite), a Jewish member of their troop who was captured. There’s a whole lot to relish in the two men — both an obvious stand-in for communities that may have the most to lose from an Axis victory — not only giving Nazis the slip but living to fight another day.

The less-than-stellar staples of the genre(s) are there, too, including gaping plot holes and baffling character choices — not to mention that many of the plot developments are far too predictable to be anything resembling twists. That’s likely beside the point if you’re a fan of the action, sci-fi, horror, and war elements that coalesce to such delightfully dark, delicious ends in Overlord. The film even gives us a villain so dastardly he’s willing to kidnap and torture a child, and whose outside comes to match his sickeningly macabre interior. 

Under those circumstances, originality can be overrated, especially when there’s no official IP involved. It’s too bad the marketing also seemed confused as to how to promote Overlord, with the trailer coming off as a baffling jumble of content rather than a cohesive whole and placing such emphasis on producer J.J. Abrams’s involvement that he is the sole cast credit on the movie’s poster.

Of course, even with all the horrors on display, movies like Overlord obviously don’t compare to the real horrors of fascism (especially as they’re threatening to repeat themselves). In the years ahead, Overlord should remain a grotesque coping mechanism, a way to grapple with the reality of what we’re really capable of inflicting on each other — something no mere movie could match. In such cases, sitting back and watching clearly good guys fight bad guys who are so evil they spit on baseballs can be genuine comfort food.