By Mo Moshaty

The flesh remembers what the mind denies.

When the patriarch dies, the hunger doesn’t end but simply rearranges itself.

In Jorge Michael Grau’s Somos lo que hay (2010), the act of eating human flesh is neither indulgence or shock, but ritual. The family at the film center inherits cannibalism not as rebellion but as religion. They kill because they were taught to. They consumed because belief demands it. Grau doesn’t fetishize their horror. He dignifies it with the gravity of inheritance. The violence is methodical, almost prayerful.

The film opens in broad daylight, a man convulsing in a Mexico City market. He’s ignored and swept away like last night’s trash. His watch breaks, his body disappears, but his absence doesn’t free anyone. It metastasizes. Inside the family’s dim apartment, the father’s law lingers like mold: invisible everywhere and hard to kill.

The Body of Tradition

He taught us to eat so we would not be eaten.

The father’s death leaves a vacuum, not relief. The structure stands, but it’s hollowed, and each member rushes to fill the shape he left behind. At its center: Alfredo (Francisco Barreiro), the eldest son, trembling beneath expectation. Sabina (Paulina Gaitán), the daughter, equal parts caretaker and conspirator. The mother Patricia (Carmen Beato), the high priestess of repression, anger and manipulation.

But where Alfredo trembles and Sabina endures, the youngest Julián, (Alan Chávez) acts. His body is pure reaction, restless, volatile, dripping with inherited rage. His hypersexuality is not liberation but mimicry, his aggression and imitation of the father’s entitlement.

Even before the families violence spills outward, Julián’s brutality festers inward. He taunts. He gropes. He laughs too loudly. He treats women, including the ones they abduct for ritual, as vessels, an extension of the patriarchal faith he never questioned nor understands. The tragedy isn’t that Julián is monstrous, it’s that he’s obedient. His cruelty is the most faithful translation of what he’s been taught.

The Prodigal Son, the Dutiful Daughter and the Heir of Violence

You’re the Man now, you have to feed us.

Alfredo is the reluctant inheritor. He’s an eldest son, haunted by responsibility, performing masculinity like penance. His mother and siblings anoint him with authority he doesn’t want, and Grau films him as if he’s dissolving under its weight. Sabina, in contrast, practices obedience as control. She tends, she cleans, she consecrates. Her devotion binds the family; her tenderness becomes a form of governance.

Julián, though, is the father reborn without the father’s restraint. He embodies the worst promise of patriarchy: that violence and virility are proof of power. His aggression towards the woman they abduct is not an outlier. It’s the ritual turned inward. The hunger that devours strangers has begun to consume itself.

In Julián, Grau externalizes the internalized violence as inheritance; brutality is the only intimacy he’s ever been shown. His sexual aggression, his mockery of women, his dominance over his siblings, these are all learned prayers in the church of their father’s absence. Sabina watches him with a mixture of horror and recognition. She cleans up after his violence, as she cleans after every man’s: another ritual, another one acknowledged penance.

The Mother as Enforcer of the Sacred Wound

He was a good man. We must keep his word.

If the father is law, Patricia is its warden. Her grief isn’t tenderness, its governance. Grau’s matriarch rules through devotion to the man who destroyed her, maintaining his mythology with the fervor of the devout. Her faith is survival. Her denial is self-defense.

What the family calls tradition began as the father’s appetite. Before he died, he often brought home sex workers, sometimes for the rituals, sometimes not. The distinction was never clear, and that ambiguity corroded her. His lust was public. His affection private, his power absolute. The mother’s piety calcified in direct response. To preserve her dignity, she rebranded his transgressions as sacrament. It’s easier to canonize a monster than to admit that you loved one, so she rewrites him as a good man and redirects the narrative. The sex workers he used become symbols of sin, not suffering. His hunger becomes holy, and she builds a gospel around his absence: without the ritual we will surely die, so follow me or perish.

Her piousness is projection, not purity. She hides her bitterness in doctrine, and her humiliation in order. The ritual becomes both punishment and protection: if she can keep the faith, she never has to face what he’s done to her.

When the family abducts a sex worker after the father’s death, the mother’s rage turns liturgical. She lashes out at them with a hatred so absolute it feels sacred. She isn’t avenging morality, she’s exercising shame. Her cruelty births the family’s doom and all the siblings feel it.

Her abuse is selective and strategic. Alfredo receives the brunt of her verbal and emotional punishment. He is her disappointment. Her disgust and the venom of a love she can’t offer. He is the image of a man she served but never satisfied and she hates him for it. Julián is brutal but simple, and he escapes most of her wrath. His obedience makes him familiar, uncomplicated. Sabina is spared her touch entirely, perhaps because the mother recognizes in her the possibility of rebellion or worse, empathy.

Patricia’s devotion to the Father’s memory is built on repression. Any deviation threatens the structure she’s sacrificed everything to preserve. Alfredo’s identity and his longing for freedom, his potential for softness becomes her apocalypse, so she doubles down, preaching obedience as though the world depends on it.

It does, in her mind. Without doctrine there is no meaning. Without meaning there is only grief, and grief, once named, would kill her. Grau makes her faith a form of rot: the insistence that righteousness can grow from decay. She keeps the ritual alive, not out of belief, but out of fear of what silence might reveal. Patricia’s horror isn’t in her violence but in her conviction, because she truly believes that to stop would be a death sentence.

The City Eats Us Too

Who are we if not the predator?

Mexico City moves along like a living organism. It’s staged as indifferent, self-consuming and carnivorous in this film. Grau’s camera renders it not as backdrop but as an ecosystem, one that feeds on labor, secrecy and fear. The family believes themselves to be its main hunters when hey are simply another species of prey.

When Alfredo and Julián leave the apartment to hunt, they move on with the arrogance of apex predators. They target the vulnerable: children, women, the disposable poor. Never men, never those who might look them in the eye. Their ritual defines them as superior, as inheritors of divine appetite.  But their predation is cowardly, parasitic, and a performance of power dependent on the invisibility of their victims.

They feed downward on the social food chain, but survival still flows from the top. Without money, without rent, without the market stalls that sell them their meager food, they’d die within days. Grau makes their hunt look absurdly small against the sprawl of the city. They stalk alleyways and bus stops, but they’re surrounded by towers of concrete, neon and noise, all of it feeding on them in turn.

Patricia’s terror is that they’ll die if they do not eat as prophecy; it’s propaganda. Her doctrine of consumption has blinded them to the truth: that the city is already consuming them. They are sustained only by the order they imagined themselves. Outside of every ritual meal is a denial of dependence.

When she makes that fatal mistake of turning on the sex workers and dropping one of their own on their doorstep, she breaks the unspoken rule of the city’s ecosystem. They mistake those women for prey, but the city protects its own. The sex workers speak. Their justice isn’t divine; its civic. The family’s secret becomes public, and society, this monstrous, grinding organism they thought themselves above, strikes back with perfect, natural indifference.

Grau exposes the hierarchy as delusion. The family is not at the top of anything. They’re the city’s leftovers, feeding on scraps of myth and calling it dominion. In the end, they are consumed by the same hunger they mistook for power.

The Collapse and the Quiet

No one remembers why eat, only that we must.

The ritual begins to unravel in earnest, the illusion of order devoured by chaos. Alfredo and Julián’s hunting trips grow sloppier, their arrogance replaced by panic. The city is closing in, and rumors spread.

Grau shoots the eventual raid on the family like a fever dream. Smoke, shouting, the echo of a home coming undone. The family that once believed itself sacred becomes just another crime scene. Yet within the chaos, one gesture ruptures the film’s ruckus: the moment Alfredo bites Sabina.

It happens fast, almost tenderly. His face presses to her shoulder, not enraged, but in recognition. Blood blooms and she recoils, but she doesn’t scream. It’s an act of violence, yes, but it’s also an act of transference. Alfredo knows he is not going to make it out of this alive. so he passes on where he cannot protect her from their lineage, their hunger, their burden. In that bite, Alfredo finally fulfills his role as patriarch, not through domination but through contagion. He ensures the ritual survives even as the house burns down around them.

Sabina is seen as the victim. The police kill Alfredo and Julián. Patricia is dragged from the playground swing set she sought refuge in by the sex workers. The frame holds on Sabina’s face as she is tenderly carried out of the house. She is alive, but now untethered from the family unit. And Grau leaves her story unresolved. The ambiguity is deliberate, almost cruel. As Sabina shimmies out of her hospital window and into the city street, we see her carry the hunger forward as she stares down a man who meets her gaze. Are her thoughts on expanding into a new family unit? Or is it a first step into freedom and taking a bite into something other than human flesh?

---

If you’d like to follow the hunger a little further, you can hear my full audio commentary with Shelah Rowan-Legg on Somos lo que hay as part of Vinegar Syndrome’s 2024 Blu-ray release of We Are What We Are.

The re-release has:

• New audio commentary by Shelagh Rowan-Legg and Mo Moshaty
• The Hunger That Remains – new video essay by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
• Archival interviews with cast and crew
• Reversible sleeve artwork
• English subtitles

🔗 Buy or learn more: https://vinegarsyndrome.com/products/we-are-what-we-are