Are We Not Cats (2016)

Movie: Are We Not Cats (2016), directed by Xander Robin

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 6.84 miles, 9’37”/mile, 01:05:53 (slow recovery run)

 

As much as I enjoyed seeing Night of the Demons again, I’m told that variety is the spice of what-currently-passes-for-life-these-days. If you happen to ascribe to that philosophy, I have some good news for you: if you’re looking for a horror flick that’s the polar opposite to ’80s Halloween-night demon-possession with gratuitous teen nudity, you could do worse than cueing up Are We Not Cats. It has no slashers, ghosts, or jump scares—really, no scares at all. The only demons it has are inner ones and the only zombies are literally everyone going about their day-to-day existences. But it’s an indie film that soaks you through with so much dread and revulsion you’ll want to peel off your skin and boil it in bleach for a few hours after the credits roll. Oh, and it’s a love story. 

 

Eli is not having a good day. By two minutes in, his girlfriend has threatened him with a restraining order; by the four-minute mark he’s lost his job driving a garbage truck; and before six minutes have gone by he’s lost his home, as his parents have sold the house they all live in and need him to move out in the morning. But at least they’re giving him the dad’s old panel truck.

 

This is when you start to get the idea that everything about this movie is precisely calculated to make you uncomfortable: not even seven minutes have elapsed by the time you’ve watched Eli wrestle a dresser down an outdoor flight of stairs, across the snowy pavement, and up into the moving truck all by himself. Less than a minute later he’s parallel-parked badly and set off someone’s car alarm. By 8:44 he’s hanging out awkwardly on a friend’s couch being told he can use the shower, but not any of the towels. By 9:24 he’s standing naked in the world’s dirtiest tub, turning a wrench to start a trickle of water out of a bare pipe and trying to wash himself. By 9:49 his truck has been vandalized. It just keeps going.

 

We’ll stop the blow-by-blow of awfulness at 11 minutes, when we see Eli pull hairs out of his beard and eat them. This, it turns out, is important. He accepts a $200 one-shot gig to deliver a rusty engine upstate and is so late that he gets guilted into driving the stranded customer, Kyle, a ride further north. After sort-of bonding over drinking toxic antifreeze (yup), Kyle brings Eli to a basement noise party, where Eli first spots Anya, Kyle’s rail-thin, purple-wigged girlfriend who is clearly unwell. Eli is immediately smitten—more so when they’re crashing out in his truck after the party and he sees her pull out her own hair and eat it. It’s clearly a match made in… well, not heaven, obviously, but this entire movie is about finding out whether we’re looking at hell or just purgatory.

 

So, between bouts of eating free ketchup soup in roadside diners and peeing blood, Eli works out his Grand Romantic Gesture, which is to go back to the location of the party and steal a light-up organ that Anya seemed so taken with. He then drives it to Al’s Lumberyard, where Anya works cutting down trees, to give it to her—and winds up getting a job from Al in the bargain. After work he delivers the organ to Anya’s loft, where she’s building “one big machine that emits colors and movements to the groove of a record.”

 

Things get weirdly intimate; they confess their anxieties about their respective health problems, Anya shows Eli her machine in action, they both eat Eli’s hair, and Anya reveals that she is nearly bald beneath her wig because of her compulsion. Will these two crazy kids find love despite the usual barriers of life-threatening health problems and one having eaten all the other’s hair in the night? Or will they let a little thing like nonconsensual DIY abdominal surgery get in their way?

 

Are We Not Cats is, to put it mildly, unconventional, but weirdly beautiful—or, to be more accurate, beautifully ugly. The movie frames some really nice visual and thematic parallels: the cutting down of trees and the pulling of hairs, Eli’s light-up toy piano and the organ he steals for Anya, Anya stitching up Eli’s torn shirt and Eli stitching up Anya’s incision (both break the thread with their teeth). This sort of thing often comes across as aggressively art-school, but here it’s quite organic. All of the performances are disturbingly believable, and the film clocks in at a lean 77 minutes long, which is exactly the time it needs to tell its story and leave you wondering what hit you.

 

I should mention that this is one of those movies that I liked way more upon reflection. It’s so viscerally disturbing that right when it was over I thought I wasn’t a fan, but the more distance I got from it the more I realized how good it was. Your mileage may vary A LOT—indeed, I’m sure there are zillions of people who’d argue that Are We Not Cats isn’t a horror movie at all, despite all its body horror and horror of just living life. But if you’re willing to forgo actual scares and wander a few light years off the beaten path, you may well be the sort of person who can appreciate its brand of desolation and unrelenting weirdness. After all, like Anya says: red’s a shout, green’s a scream.