The Upcoming
  • Culture
    • Art
    • Cinema & Tv
      • Movie reviews
      • Film festivals
      • Shows
    • Food & Drinks
      • News & Features
      • Restaurant & bar reviews
      • Interviews & Recipes
    • Literature
    • Music
      • Live music
    • Theatre
  • Fashion & Lifestyle
    • Accessories
    • Beauty
    • News & Features
    • Shopping & Trends
    • Tips & How-tos
    • Fashion weeks
  • What’s On
    • Art exhibitions
    • Theatre shows
  • Tickets
  • Join us
    • Editorial unit
    • Our writers
    • Join the team
    • Join the mailing list
    • Support us
    • Contact us
  • Interviews
  • Competitions
  • Special events
    • Film festivals
      • Berlin
      • Tribeca
      • Sundance London
      • Cannes
      • Locarno
      • Venice
      • London
      • Toronto
    • Fashion weeks
      • London Fashion Week
      • New York Fashion Week
      • Milan Fashion Week
      • Paris Fashion Week
      • Haute Couture
      • London Fashion Week Men’s
  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Instagram

  • YouTube

  • RSS

CultureMovie reviews

We the Animals

We the Animals | Movie review
14 June 2019
Sylvia Unerman
Avatar
Sylvia Unerman
14 June 2019

Movie and show review

Sylvia Unerman

We the Animals

★★★★★

Release date

14th June 2019

Certificate

UPG121518 title=

Links

TwitterInstagramFacebookWebsite

Justin Torres’s 2011 novel is imbued with a vibrancy verging on the uncomfortable in Jeremiah Zagar’s cinematic take. We the Animals presents fragments from the coming of age of the novel’s ten-year-old protagonist Jonah (Evan Rosado) and his brothers (Isaiah Kristian, Josiah Gabriel), grappling with the undercurrents of a familial love tinged with an ever-present possibility of danger.

The central actors deliver astonishing performances, evoking a playful freedom in the private space of the home and the landscape of upstate New York that seems to foreshadow its own dissolution. Rosado shines in his first film role, while Raúl Castillo and Sheila Vand achieve a partnership inescapably framed within their past as unsupported teenage parents. The effect is to tear the audience’s sympathies back and forth, presenting pain and trauma as forces that linger – transformed, perhaps, but never absent.

This impression is masterfully crafted in the cinematography – scenes sun-faded like film, edited into segments that function as fragments of memory and interspersed with epistolary animations drawn from Jonah’s own early memoirs that fix the chronology into the young protagonist’s viewpoint, leaving the audience to make connections that might escape the children of this story. The rhythms of the natural landscape – the damp heat of summer shown transitioning into torrential rains and heavy snow – proceed alongside the adventures of the three brothers, each carrying the beginnings of change and growth to come.

If a criticism is to be levelled, it would question the efficacy of the medium in translating some the issues raised in Torres’ novel – the visual beauty of the film is not quite disrupted during scenes that might merit a harsher touch, such as the boys’ discovery of bruises on their mother’s face, or their searches through an empty kitchen, necessitated by ravenous hunger. However, the dreamlike quality of Zagar’s film remains honest to a child’s perspective, with the anaesthetising effect suggesting throughout that the real impact of violence and neglect are yet to be processed, yet to be confronted.

★★★★★

Sylvia Unerman

We the Animals is released in select cinemas on 14th June 2019.

Watch the trailer for We the Animals here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXLUBQ0lW8g

Related Itemsfeaturedreview

More in Movie reviews

Notturno

★★★★★
Mersa Auda
Read More

The Winter Lake

★★★★★
Guy Lambert
Read More

Justine

★★★★★
Abbie Grundy
Read More

Lucky

★★★★★
Jacob Kennedy
Read More

Foster Boy

★★★★★
Jim Compton-Hall
Read More

Crazy About Her

★★★★★
Emma Kiely
Read More

Bigfoot Family

★★★★★
Mersa Auda
Read More

Judas and the Black Messiah

★★★★★
James Humphrey
Read More

Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell

★★★★★
Jake Cudsi
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap

Movie and show review

Sylvia Unerman

We the Animals

★★★★★

Release date

14th June 2019

Certificate

UPG121518 title=

Links

TwitterInstagramFacebookWebsite

  • Popular

  • Latest

  • TOP PICKS

  • Creation Stories
    ★★★★★
    Film festivals
  • Detroit Stories – Alice Cooper
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • Judas and the Black Messiah
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • Gatsby at Cadogan Hall: An interview with Jodie Steele and Ross William Wild
    Theatre
  • Laura Mvula – Under a Pink Moon
    ★★★★★
    Live music
  • Back to the Wharf
    ★★★★★
    Film festivals
  • I’m Your Man (Ich bin dein Mensch)
    ★★★★★
    Berlinale
  • We (Nous)
    ★★★★★
    Berlinale
  • Language Lessons
    ★★★★★
    Berlinale
  • Moon, 66 Questions
    ★★★★★
    Berlinale
  • We (Nous)
    ★★★★★
    Berlinale
  • Bicep at Saatchi Gallery Online
    ★★★★★
    Live music
  • The Winter Lake
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • Spotlight: Lauren Everet and Soup Kitchen London, striving for food security and social equality
    Food & Drinks
  • Da Capo
    ★★★★★
    Film festivals
The Upcoming
Pages
  • Contact us
  • Join mailing list
  • Join us
  • Our London food map
  • Our writers
  • Support us
  • What, when, why

Copyright © 2011-2020 FL Media

Pictures of Dorian Gray at Jermyn Street Theatre | Theatre review
Exceptional Promise at Bush Theatre | Theatre review