We the Animals

A poignant and poetic evocation of childhood

We were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful - little animals, clawing at what we needed.

• Justin Torres; We the Animals (2011)

A remarkably contained and intimate story featuring only five main cast members and around ten locations, We the Animals is about a young boy awakening to the fact that he's homosexual. Equal parts disassociated lyricism and warts-and-all grittiness, in attempting to untangle the struggles concomitant with his burgeoning queerness, the film looks at issues such as the ever-increasing distance between himself and two brothers with whom he was once so close, the dawning realisation that although his parents love each other, so too are they destroying one another, and the fact that the crystallising of one's perception of the world goes hand-in-hand with a loss of innocence. Despite the themes with which it engages, however, We the Animals is relatively apolitical (never once, for example, does it feel like a principled ideological stand against notions of heteronormativity, whilst the domestic violence in the family is shown as coming from both parents, not just the father). Less concerned with narrative beats and character arcs than with tone and impressionistic visual poetry, the film operates in a similar magical realist key as Benh Zeitlin's masterful Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), whilst also calling to mind the Texas scenes of Terrence Malick's opus The Tree of Life (2011), especially in the whispery pronouncements of the voiceover narration. Mixing nostalgia, idealism, recrimination, anger, personal freedom, and the constant conflict between optimism and experience into a potent whole, whilst the narrative could be accused of being a little insubstantial, We the Animals is an effective and poignant evocation of the modulations of childhood.

Set in upstate New York in the 1990s, the film tells the story of nine-year-old Jonah (Evan Rosado...