The Cannibal Run

Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be much of an audience for Mexican cannibal dramas at 4.30pm on a Sunday afternoon and so it was that I enjoyed an almost private screening of 'We Are What We Are' at the Covent Garden Odeon.

The set-up finds a decidedly eccentric family left bereft by the sudden death of their father. Who now is going to bring home the bacon? Or rather, the human flesh they seem compelled (for never fully explained reasons) to devour? The intense kids prove pretty incompetent in the kidnap and murder stakes, but the harridan-like mother is more dedicated to the pursuit of fresh meat.

Even as a connoisseur of the somewhat bizarre I found this a hard film to categorise. The first two thirds are something like a slow-moving art-house movie about social alienation in a developing country. The final third a bloodbath of shootings, shovels-to-the-head, gougings, disembowelling and flesh-eating. It's one of those films that it would be difficult to call 'good' but it is oddly compelling anyway.

In that sense, and in others, 'We Are What We Are' is oddly reminiscent of a British cannibal film from the early 70s. The mighty 'Death Line' featured a crazed cannibal - a descendant of buried alive construction workers - on the loose on the London Underground, howling his memorable cry of 'Mind the gap!'. Both films have a dark, murky atmosphere; feature a pair of somewhat sleazy cops on the trail of the cannibals and have a certain sympathy for their flesh-eating protagonists. Has Jorge Michel Grau, director of 'We Are What We Are', taken a cue from this earlier work? It would be nice to think so, and know that great British hokum is informing the stranger offerings from foreign fields.