Synopsis
Manny, Joel and Jonah tear their way through childhood and push against the volatile love of their parents. As Manny and Joel grow into versions of their father and Ma dreams of escape, Jonah, the youngest, embraces an imagined world all his own.
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Cast
- Evan RosadoJonah
- Raúl CastilloPaps
- Sheila VandMa
- Josiah SantiagoJoel
- Isaiah KristianManny
- Giovanni PacciarelliDustin
- Moe IsaacDustin’s Grandpa
- Amelia CampbellWoman in Van
- Mickey AnthonyClerk
Recommandations
- 100
Village Voice
Brawling yet tender, wild yet rigorously controlled, first-time fiction director Jeremiah Zagar’s We the Animals is an impressionistic swirl of a film about masculinity, about abuse, about growing up queer, about chaotic family life, about the jumble of incidents and stirrings through which a child discovers a self. - 91
IndieWire
While Zagar doesn’t force the material into many surprising places, it’s a fully realized tapestry, owing much to the complex, layered score by Nick Zammuto that hums through nearly every scene, and frequent cutaways to hand-drawn animation based on the scrapbook that Jonah stores under his bed at night. - 90
The Hollywood Reporter
In his first narrative feature, documentary maker Jeremiah Zagar (In a Dream, Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart) captures the feel of the novel with uncanny precision, notably in the visceral charge and physical heat of tightly wound bodies almost constantly moving in close proximity. - 88
The Seattle Times
Dreamy and impressionistic, interspersed with fantastic bursts of animation, We the Animals plays like a gauzy, mesmerizing, half-remembered experience from childhood. - 88
Movie Nation
This is “The Florida Project” set in Pennsylvania, a memoir both brilliantly specific and depressingly universal. - 83
The Playlist
This is an assured, confident feature-directing debut for Zagar who shows great promise in his ability to render a confident and brilliant work of art from difficult-to-adapt source material. His film is a complicated coming-of-age tale that not only brings refreshing insights but gives us beautifully rendered images that have the power to haunt you for days. - 83
The Film Stage
We the Animals is most effective when it breaks free from conventional storytelling and relies on image, sound, emotion, and mood. - 75
Slant Magazine
In We the Animals, director Jeremiah Zagar sustains a tone of wounded nostalgia, fashioning a formalism that appears to exist simultaneously in the past and present.
