(Curiously, in a film so clearly interested in the notion that humanity can be degraded to its constituent substances, there is very little scatological material.) “Antagonist” may not even be quite the right word for this Rumpelstiltskin-like troll, suggesting as it does any kind of moral framework in a film that aims to eradicate concepts as banal as “right” and “wrong.” Much of its most vivid imagery is purpose-built to interrogate the moral values society projects onto biological matter: human meat ground to a slush, slopping about in a bucket a clitoral close-up a pipette inserted casually into a hole in a boy’s temple a sister’s gelatinous menses dripping into her brother’s mouth. Every narrative development in the film - from a young woman (Maria Evoli) dropping to her knees to perform explicitly shot oral sex on her brother (Diego Gamaliel), to a soldier relaxing to the point of near-acquiescence as his throat is slashed and drained into a bucket - is driven by little more than the inscrutable will of Hernandez’s unnamed antagonist. To borrow a casual understatement from one of its characters: “This is not your average party.” Set almost entirely inside a derelict apartment, “We Are the Flesh” has an ace up its sleeve in lead actor Noe Hernandez (“Sin nombre,” “Miss Bala”), here playing a grotesque so demonically charismatic that the way in which other characters fall under his spell just about feels plausible.
To say that Rocha Minter hasn’t made the most polite of debut features is putting it mildly.
Commercial prospects are understandably limited to iron-stomached auds, though the pic’s opaque narrative will deter straight-up gore-hounds. A brother and sister seek refuge with a filthy old man who coerces the siblings into incestuous sexual intercourse, and thereafter into cannibalizing a luckless soldier - a brief synopsis that barely hints at the intensity with which the Mexican shocker “ We Are the Flesh” unleashes its joyously demented portrait of humanity. Serving as co-editor as well as writer and director, Emiliano Rocha Minter is very much the author of all the chaos wrought here, and his thoroughly arresting vision could squat quite comfortably alongside Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of hell.
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