Justin Torres’ autobiographical debut novel “We the Animals” is told at first in the first person plural, and this film adaptation directed by Jeremiah Zagar uses this conceit for its narration.
“Look at us,” says our young narrator Jonah (Evan Rosado) on the soundtrack, as we see him playing with his two brothers. “When we were brothers, we wanted more… more volume, more muscles… us three… us kings… us brothers.” This narration gets largely abandoned as “We the Animals” goes on, which mimics what happens in Torres’s book when Jonah starts to separate himself from his brothers and his parents, and refers to them as “they.”
Zagar has smartly decided to tell this very subjective story of childhood with an expressionist visual style that favors saturated colors, and he often leans on an unusually suggestive and potent sound design that sometimes leads us seamlessly from one memory to the next. When Jonah’s father, known only as Paps (Raúl Castillo, “Looking”), throws him into the water to force him to learn how to swim, the sound of his panic as he sinks slowly downward blends into the sound of the car taking him home.
Paps and Ma (Sheila Vand, “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”) met when they were in high school in Brooklyn, and they went to upstate New York to look for work. Ma works in a bottle factory and Paps does security work, and it doesn’t seem like they have any friends or family. The three boys are isolated with their young parents in a house that feels closed-off from everything else around it, and so things get Freudian very quickly in their little family world.
The prototype for this kind of modern memory film is Terrence Malick’s great “The Tree of Life,” and that’s a high bar to try to clear for a director making his first narrative movie, but Zagar shows talent here, even if the shots at times feel overly showy. (There’s a POV composition from the inside of a toilet that the boys are staring into that feels like those silly shots in 1940s movies where the camera stares out from inside a fireplace.)
Zagar diligently searches for the core of the material, and this often proves tricky. Paps has a temper, and he gives Ma a split lip after a fight, yet we don’t see him hit her and we do see her physically attack him when he brings home a truck with no seatbelts. Jonah is sometimes mystified by their relationship, and that’s understandable, because he’s nine years old. But the movie itself often doesn’t seem to fully understand their relationship either.
Paps and Ma are both fairly soft-hearted, even when they try to act tough, and they still have a sexual need for each other, but they keep directing too much of their emotion onto their sons, particularly Jonah. Paps is Puerto Rican, and Ma is white, and this is made much of as a division between them. When Paps has music on, he tells Jonah, “You shake it like you’re white, like your Ma… shake it like you’re Puerto Rican!”
When Ma makes an attempt to run away with the boys, she tells them that maybe they can go to Spain, where all the guys would look like them. And there is a particularly ugly moment when Paps’s boss addresses the boys and says, “At least you’re only half as ugly as your Daddy is.”
But this difference is at the core of Jonah’s attraction to a young blond teenage boy that he befriends and longs for. The boy compares his own pale skin to Jonah’s darker skin, and this only makes Jonah fetishize the boy even more as they watch porno tapes together.
In most conventional movies of this sort, Paps would be far more of an abusive figure and the blond boy would likely be abusive in some way too, and that’s what we wait for. But “We the Animals” is told from the point of view of a fast-maturing boy who begins to revel in his distance from his family members after being far too close to them. And so Jonah is not the victimized protagonist but the tough observer, who is strong enough to push his needy mother away when her emotional demands are too insistent.
“We the Animals” was a book that announced the talent of its author, and so “We the Animals” the film functions in a similar way for its director, who mainly passes his Terrence Malick imagery test. This movie version sometimes feels evasive or incomplete, partly because you can describe some things in a book that you cannot show on a screen, but it is in most ways an admirable adaptation that does look and sound like memories of a particular childhood.
97 Sundance Portraits From TheWrap at Acura Studios With Keira Knightley, Robert Pattinson and More (Photos)
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Actress Chloë Sevigny, "Lizzie"
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"Lizzie" writer Bryce Kass, actor Denis O'Hare, director Craig William Macneill and actress Chloë Sevigny
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"Believer" director Don Argott with subjects Tyler Glenn and Dan Reynolds
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"What They Had" stars Taissa Farmiga, Michael Shannon, writer-director Elizabeth Chomko, Blythe Danner and Hilary Swank
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Actor Michael Shannon, "What They Had"
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Meg McGarry, Flynn McGarry, Cameron Yates and Laura Coxson, "Chef Flynn"
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Flynn McGarry, "Chef Flynn"
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Director Jesse Peretz, "Juliet, Naked"
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Actor Chris-O'Dowd, "Juliet, Naked"
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Director Eugene Jarecki, "The King"
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"An Evening With Beverly Luff Lin" director Jim Hosking with stars Aubrey Plaza, Matt Berry, Craig Robinson, and Jemaine Clement
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"Private Life" stars Kayli Carter and Kathryn Hahn with writer-director Tamara Jenkins
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Actress Kayli Carter, "Private Life"
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"Private Life" producer, Ali Abouomar
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"Eighth Grade" writer-director Bo Burnham and star Elsie Fisher
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Actress Kiersey Clemons, "Hearts Beat Loud"
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"Arizona" director Jonathan Watson with stars Luke Wilson, Elizabeth Gillies, Danny McBride, Lolli Sorenson, Kaitlin Olsen and Rosemarie Dewitt
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Actress Elizabeth Gillies, "Arizona"
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"Dead Pigs" director Cathy Yan with stars Li Meng, Zazie Beetz and David Rhysdahl
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Director Cathy Yan, "Dead Pigs"
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Actress Zazie Beetz, "Dead Pigs"
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Writer-actor Rafael Casal, director Carlos López Estrada, writer-actor Daveed Diggs, actors Janina Gavankar, Justin Chu Cory and Jasmine Cephas Jones, "Blindspotting"
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Jason Ritter, "The Tale"
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Actor Common, "The Tale"
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Isabella Amara, "The Tale"
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Writer-director-star Carlson Young, "The Blazing World"
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Robert Pattinson and Mia Wasikowska, "Damsel"
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Actor Robert Pattinson, "Damsel"
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Actress Mia Wasikowska, "Damsel"
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Director Silas Howard, "A Kid Like Jake"
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Jim Parsons, "A Kid Like Jake"
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Actress Priyanka Chopra, "A Kid Like Jake"
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Claire Danes, "A Kid Like Jake"
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Actress Octavia Spencer, "A Kid Like Jake"
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Actors Jeffrey Wright, Kelvin Harrison Jr., and director Anthony Mandler, "Monster"
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Dominic West and Kiera Knightly, "Colette"
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Actress Kiera Knightly, "Colette"
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Actor John Cho, "Search"
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"The Kindergarten Teacher" director, Sara Colangelo and actress, Maggie Gyllenhaal
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"The Kindergarten Teacher" actress, Maggie Gyllenhaal
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"The Kindergarten Teacher" actress, Anna Baryshnikov
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Musician Aloe Blacc, "America's Musical Journey"
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Director Jessica Sanders, "End of the Line"
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Forest Whitaker, "Burden"
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Garrett Hedlund, "Burden"
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Director Talal Derki, "Of Fathers and Sons"
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Director, Boots Riley, "Sorry to Bother You"
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Lakeith Stanfield, "Sorry to Bother You"
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Armie Hammer, "Sorry to Bother You"
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Actor Jason Segel, "Come Sunday"
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Actress Condola Rashad, "Come Sunday"
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Director Stephen Maing, "Crime and Punishment"
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The young women of the "Skate Kitchen" skate collective, with director Crystal Moselle and co-star Jaden Smith, "Skate Kitchen"
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Jaden Smith, "Skate Kitchen"
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Actor Charlie Sexton, director Ethan Hawke, actress Alia Shawkat, actor Josh Hamilton, and acorr Ben Dickey, "Blaze"
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Director Ethan Hawke, “Blaze"
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Actress Alia Shawkat, “Blaze"
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Actor Ben Dickey, “Blaze"
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Charlie Sexton, “Blaze"
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"The Devil You Know" director Stephanie Soechtig and her four subjects
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Director Stephanie Soechtig, "The Devil You Know"
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Actress Hari Nef, writer-director Sam Levinson and actors Colman Domingo and Bill Skårsgard, "Assassination Nation"
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Bill Skårsgard, "Assassination Nation"
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Writer-director Sam Levinson, "Assassination Nation"
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Actor Coleman Damingo, "Assassination Nation"
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Actress Helena Howard, "Madeline's Madeline"
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Chris McGurk, CEO of Cinedigm
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Director David Wain, actors Domhnall Gleeson, Tom Lennon, and Emmy Rossum, "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"
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Emmy Rossum, "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"
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Domhnall Gleeson, "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"
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Director Brad Anderson, "Beirut"
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Raul Castillo, Jeremiah Zagar, Sheila Vand, and Justin Torres, "We the Animals"
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Author Justin Torres, "We the Animals"
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Actress Sheila Vand, "We the Animals"
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Actor Raul Castillo, "We the Animals"
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Actors Maia Mitchell and Cami Marrone with writer-director Augustine Frizzell, “Never Goin’ Back”
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Cami Morrone, “Never Goin’ Back”
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Actress Augustine Frizzell, "Never Goin' Back"
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Actress Maia Mitchell, "Never Goin' Back"
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Director Jack Henry Robbins and producer Tim Robbins, "Painting With Joan"
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Co-writer and star Franchesca Ramsey, "Franchesca"
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Producer Trey Ellis, "King in the Wilderness"
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Actors Valter Skarsgard, Lucian Charles Collier, Sky Ferreira, Jack Kilmer, director Jonas Akerlund, Wilson Gonzalez, and Rory Culkin, "Lords of Chaos"
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Actor Valter Skarsgard, "Lords of Chaos"
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Rory Culkin, "Lords of Chaos"
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"Lords of Chaos" star Wilson Gonzalez
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Director and co-writer Jonas Akerlund, "Lords of Chaos"
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Jack Kilmer, "Lords of Chaos"
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Joan Jett, "Bad Reputation"
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Director and co-writer Daryl Wein, "White Rabbit"
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Actor Graham Verchere, actor Rich Sommer, co-directors Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell, writers Matt Leslie and Stephen J. Smith, actress Tiera Skovbye, and actor Caleb Emery, "Summer of '84"
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Caleb Emery, "Summer of '84"
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Actress Tiera Skovbye, "Summer of '84"
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Actor Luis Gerardo Mendez, "Time Share"
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Actor Matthew Lillard, "Halfway There"
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Sarah Shahi, "Halfway There"
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Sundance 2018: Hilary Swank, Forest Whitaker and Armie Hammer among the stars shot by photographer Irvin Rivera in Park City
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