WE THE ANIMALS ***1/2
Jeremiah Zagar
2018
IDEA: Jonah, the youngest of three brothers in a rural New York household, struggles with his identity amidst a tumultuous family life.
BLURB: We the Animals is a film about nascent otherness that is acutely rooted in the point-of-view of its young protagonist. Enmeshing hazy magic-hour imagery with animated interludes, it lyrically and achingly expresses Jonah’s flowering understanding of his queerness, offering an interior account of his desires and anxieties as they emerge from and come to bear on his incipient identity. Many films can be called “dreamlike,” but the descriptor is especially apt for We the Animals: its visualizations of Jonah’s fantasies, whether closer to waking life or reverie, are semi-surreal representations that read as authentically shaped by experience and unconscious feelings, percolating with eroticism, shame, euphoria, and fear that can’t be easily delineated. This mercurial affective flow is especially potent when associated with the sweetly doleful face of Evan Rosado. The young actor, typically shot in extreme close-ups that linger on his yearning blue eyes, creates a tender and lived-in anchor around which the film’s often violent, fulminating drama churns, attuning us to his vulnerable status as he tries to make sense of the storms both within and outside of him. In his curious but bashful gaze we see the world as he does: alluring, confusing, hostile, and potentially magical. And in his dreams, the private refuge of his mind with which we’re allowed this brief, stirring communion, we can imagine with him the possibility of freedom.
BLURB: We the Animals is a film about nascent otherness that is acutely rooted in the point-of-view of its young protagonist. Enmeshing hazy magic-hour imagery with animated interludes, it lyrically and achingly expresses Jonah’s flowering understanding of his queerness, offering an interior account of his desires and anxieties as they emerge from and come to bear on his incipient identity. Many films can be called “dreamlike,” but the descriptor is especially apt for We the Animals: its visualizations of Jonah’s fantasies, whether closer to waking life or reverie, are semi-surreal representations that read as authentically shaped by experience and unconscious feelings, percolating with eroticism, shame, euphoria, and fear that can’t be easily delineated. This mercurial affective flow is especially potent when associated with the sweetly doleful face of Evan Rosado. The young actor, typically shot in extreme close-ups that linger on his yearning blue eyes, creates a tender and lived-in anchor around which the film’s often violent, fulminating drama churns, attuning us to his vulnerable status as he tries to make sense of the storms both within and outside of him. In his curious but bashful gaze we see the world as he does: alluring, confusing, hostile, and potentially magical. And in his dreams, the private refuge of his mind with which we’re allowed this brief, stirring communion, we can imagine with him the possibility of freedom.
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