Popular reviews

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  Review by Sean Baker 4

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Wow. Well... I was warned this was explicit but was expecting explicit violence, not sexual content. So was taken aback at first by the actors' bravery with the nudity and sex scenes.

  Excellent performances by all the actors but Noé Hernández and María Evoli are truly striking. I could see them easily breaking in to Hollywood.
  And director Emiliano Rocha Minter is a fresh and original voice.

  Worth seeking out. Just be warned... real sex and hardcore violence.

  Good extras on the Arrow Video Blu-ray.

  The throat cutting. I appreciate how realistically this was depicted but damn... that's an image I'll won't ever get out of my head. And not sure I'm any better for it.

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  Review by nathaxnne [hiatus] ★★★★★ 11

  I will admit it took me a little while to warm up to We Are The Flesh, but once I realized I loved and cared for it I really did. I fell pretty hard. This is less of a movie-movie and more of a cinematic realization of the theatre of Artaud and Genet, akin to 60's Happenings and Aktions, driven by psychedelics and sex to destroy human mores thru abasement/awakening and live suspended forever in the RIGHT NOW of the meat-self. This is one of the only things I have ever seen to so fully and so committedly embrace a Sadean ethics and ethos on screen. So often we are given films considered taboo-breaking or transgressive which ultimately rest on…

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  Review by Remobo ★★★ 14

  Does this bother you? Does this bother you? I mean, I'm not touching you, so this shouldn't bother you. Does this bother you? Oh! Uh-Oh! Somebody's hitting you. Why is somebody hitting you? Who's doing that? Are...are you hitting yourself? Why are you doing that? Stop hitting yourself. Isn't that annoying? So, stop doing it. Stop hitting yourself. Stop it. Stop it. You're the one doing it, so just stop. Who me? No, it's not me. I'm not touching you. See? See, look. Look right here at your arm. I'm not touching you, see?

  
  That's this movie.

  Gaspar No-way meets Alejand-No No-dorowsky.

  Recommended for fans of red wash and extended close-ups of genitalia.

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★½

  “You are nothing but rotting meat,” the grinning hermit declares from deep within the bowels of the cavernous hideout he’s made for himself in post-apocalyptic Mexico. His name is Mariano (“Miss Bala” star Noé Hernandez), his face is twisted into a demonic gnarl of primitive desire, and he’s ready to prove his point with depravities so vile they make Gaspar Noé and the rest of the world’s reigning shock auteurs look prudish by comparison.

  Unfolding like a Nuevo Cine Mexicano response to “Saló,” Emiliano Rocha Minter’s “We Are the Flesh” takes the defining tropes of his country’s contemporary filmmaking, liberates them from the burden of narrative logic, and stretches them across the screen like Hannibal Lecter hanging a victim by…

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  Review by Herb Gallow ★★★★★ 1

  Gaspar Noe is name-checked in the special thanks portion of the credits. A nice bit of etiquette after Emiliano Rocha Minter blew his fucking doors off in his first full-length film. And that’s no disrespect to Mr. Noe, an experienced hand at this point in transgressive cinema. But Mr. Minter went further and harder down the path that’s been laid down. 

  The dilapidated madhouse of the film’s setting is a suitable reflection of the inside of a person’s skull. 
  Noé Hernández is electric as Mariano, the crazed satyr that’s going to lead us down this interior path. He rattles around inside the debris field, a thumping, insane heart beating his way inside heads. From the early arrival of Fauna (María…

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  Review by Graham ★★★½ 6

  Spiralling
  Down down, on a journey to inner peace
  Colours, red and orange
  Burning inside, cold outside
  Is this a new kind of love
  Or eternal pain
  Twisting, like knives reaching
  Grabbing, snatching, cutting deep
  Freedom is out there somewhere
  But at what cost
  Brothers and sisters, a different love
  The same love, or lust
  Or just plain fear
  Confused, lost, together, alone
  The darkness is here at last
  Leading the way home
  
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  Messed up May 2022

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  Review by matt lynch ★★½ 1

  Primal scream therapy for a nation conpletely inundated by violence and corruption, sure, I get that, but this kind of self-consciously eager transgression couldn't be less interesting to me. Certainly stylish in its extremity (I especially liked the heat-vision sex scene), but so what?

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  Review by Laurie ★★★★★ 2

  We Are the Flesh feels like the Mexican cinematic equivalent of what Hassan Blasim’s short stories are to post-US invasion Iraq. It’s as if the nightmarish reality of actual events reach a point where even an unflinching representation of said realties cannot suffice in encapsulating the horror of actually living it. In both Blasim’s writing and Emiliano Rocha Minter’s debut feature, a dark, warped, magical realism is evoked, functioning as a pressure valve to release the madness beyond conventional recounting.
  We Are the Flesh may be considered unnecessarily transgressive from the perspective of western audiences, but given the ongoing situation in Mexico, how many Sicario’s does it take to get close to summing up the dread and horror of existing…

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  Review by Kurdt ★★ 14

  I mean, maybe this is some sort of vast analogy for the Mexican political climate right now, maybe. But really you could conjure up heady analogies for practically any film and not technically be wrong. All I could think when watching this sometimes visually interesting, often pointless exercise in crazy bullshit, was that it felt like the kind of film some film school bros would make, trying to be as edgy and weird as possible:

  Film Student #1 - “Ok so how about this: a horror film…with real sex!”

  Film Student #2 - “Holy shit man that is genius, people won’t know what him them! And hey, how about throwing in some necrophilia while we’re at it? Can you believe…

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  Review by Kodiak ★★★½

  This film absolutely reeks of Gaspar Noé and Alejandro Jodorowsky influence in all the best ways. It’s a visual and audial feast that doesn’t make a lick of sense, but since when was that necessary for a film to be good? It’s got it all - incest, cannibalism, necrophilia, unsimulated sex, graphic nudity, fatal orgasms, a Mexican Willem Dafoe - you name it. And maybe those aren’t all necessarily good things, but they definitely make it an interesting experience to say the least. Not something the average viewer will enjoy, but something that extreme/surreal cinema enthusiasts should seek out at least once.

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  Review by ❀ Chadwin ❀ ★★★★

  “We've chosen you by chance. Chance is the most dangerous criminal to ever roam the earth.”

  You know, I don’t say this very often about movies I watch, but like, what the fuck...

  I feel like I just spiraled into hell and I feel absolutely filthy. I need a shower now.

  The imagery is often repulsive, explicit, and sexually perverse, especially during the film’s extremely graphic scenes of incest & necrophilia. However, sprinkled in between these rotten delusions, are moments of strange, yet raw beauty. 

  I can’t begin to pretend like I understand what this film means, but I was completely entranced the entire time.

  I won’t watch this again. I won’t recommend this to anyone.  

  Do with that what you will.

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  Review by Björn Broekman ★★★★ 3

  Symphonies, of flesh and sex. Songs, of blood and bones. A force, unearthly colors in a realm of lingering madness. The naked body and the bare soul, fierce and bloodsoaked in a hell of no physical bounderies, of no other glory than brutal acceptance. A fury of pure barbarity, of cruel human limitations and the mind. A realm of vicious visions, entering the mind as a hypnotic psychopath. Tempting, vile and violent. Crushing the soul like a comet, like a cosmic razor penetrating through the skin and through the edge of civilization. Behold the creation of the flesh.