Wyatt Russell and Ambry Childers in We Are What We Are (Entertainment One)

Once every year, the patriarch of the Parker family, Frank (Bill Sage), finds a lost “lamb”–a teenage girl or a young woman, usually the likes who is changing a tire by the side of the road–kidnaps and keeps her chained in a cellar, and then his wife (Kassie DePaiva) goes down to assist him in slaughtering the poor lamb and gets the family all dressed up around the dinner table to partake a hearty meal of mutton. Did I say mutton? I mean cooked human in a stew.

While the mother is in town, she apparently dies from falling on a blunt object and drowning during a freak storm. The father is devastated; she was the mother of his children and the one in charge of the rituals. But of course, the killings won’t stop, no sir, not when he has two very healthy and able-bodied teenage daughters, Iris (Ambyr Childers) and Rose (Julia Garner), to assist in such duties. And as for his younger son? The boy just thinks he’s seen a monster when a young girl’s hand reaches out from behind the cellar door. “But why is the monster crying?” he asks one his sisters. Numb, she can barely give an answer.

We Are What We Are is a remake of a 2010 Mexican film, but writer/director Jim Mickle (of the fantastic and under-seen Stake Land) comes up with a different family dynamic. The mother called more of the shots in the original, and it was brothers, not sisters, who were stuck with the “familial” duties, not to mention Mickle moves the story from an urban setting to the Catskills.

The only issue I had in moving this family more to the outskirts is that there is a neighbor (Kelly McGillis, who I didn’t recognize at first), and she mostly serves as a kind of horror movie trope of sorts. She should know what is going on after all these years, especially around such a perpetually creepy, hollowed-eyed bunch like the Parkers.  (Perhaps the story would have make more sense out in the country). She is there mostly as a sort of “normal” character to balance out the crazy. And boy is there a lot!

There is another conventional aspect, or potentially so, with a subplot about Deputy Anders (Wyatt Russell) and Iris, the sister who is most conflicted about what she is doing. She is the older one, and Mickle emphasizes how completely torn and screwed up she has become. Could she have anything “normal” with another boy? The closest bit of humor, besides the end of the film, can be found with an exchange when the young deputy tries to ask out Iris on a date, possibly to the movies. The way she responds, “The movies?” almost makes it sound like she has never seen one.

Mickle’s film is very dark and full of bleak foreboding, and much of this stems from Sage’s disturbing performance. What makes it all the more engrossing is that, since it starts off with the mother dying, sympathy could be felt for his character, at least for a few minutes before it’s really known what he’s up to. But Frank is a psychopath. He uses the term of “family” to cloud over the fact that he basically perpetuates a cult that makes Martha Marcy May Marlene look not half-bad. He’s a terrifying villain because he uses religion and ritual as his cover for his insanity and mania, and he’s never one to yell or be TOO loud (wouldn’t want to raise suspicion with the neighbor, after all).

This is a film to see for the high quality of the acting, as Mickle, an actor himself, directs everyone to play it completely straight, which ups the ante on the horrible tragedy, shot with murky, gray, and brown colors that are still somehow vibrant in the way of a Gothic painting. (But if you’re looking for Tim Burton irony, look elsewhere). Throughout, the film builds to the ending, thick with palpability and dread from the length of the shots and the haunted looks from the actors. The conclusion, a gruesome left-field turn that would almost be laughable if it weren’t so harrowing in the buildup, is excruciating, and if one laughs during it, it’s more out of “What am I watching?” than from actual humor. We Are What We Are is a wonderfully crafted, gut-wrenching film that I am not sure I exactly want to return to very soon.