Release Date: February 23, 2018
Director: Xander Robin
Run time 78 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Not since the days of David Cronenberg has the classical approximation of love as being the act of “giving a part of one’s self to another” ever been more grotesquely literal than in Xander’s Robin’s destitute romance Are We Not Cats.
In its visceral rendering of codependency intersecting with self-destructive consumption, Robin gives a quirky premise of hair eating a proper handle of severity and complexity. Though the idea’s inherent absurdity never manifests beyond weird fascination in the film, Robin wisely knows where his interest lies and takes what he needs from trichophagia as a concept (the compulsive eating of hair obsessively pulled out under compulsion) to tell a devastatingly gross love story for the most twisted of burnouts.
From the onset of Robin’s bezoar romance, the film is predisposed to sell you on protagonist Eli being sufficiently down on his luck with the ever-present possibility of sinking even lower. Introduced hitching a ride on a garbage truck to be dumped by his girlfriend, he walks back to his parents’ house to find that they are moving and, as a consolation, he can take their moving truck, which becomes his new squatting bachelor’s pad, so to speak.
Even with this level of pathetic misfortune imbued into the character, he later finds hope and purpose in the emaciated Anya as a fellow guttersnipe whose own directionless life makes them a particularly toxic pair. Bonding over their class misfortune and accumulation of mysterious physical ailments, their relationship takes the aforementioned trip into the weird fixation of hair eating as the film partakes in making an unfortunate spectacle of their mutually assured destruction.
The acting of the two mains paints a portrait of dependent fragility in their coupling as if the finding of one another (at one of the film’s many raves set in a dilapidated warehouse) was less about love and more about support. Their shared compulsive hair eating, an inert curiosity in him and a debilitating full-on disorder in her, is not presented as a cause of their prolonged loneliness but more as a symptom or byproduct of it.
In the unlikely scenario you turned to this movie to finally have a penetrating cinematic representation of the ins and outs of trichophagia, the film isn’t particularly interested in explaining the why and how of the affliction and is instead more concerned with the who. Eli and Anya, as the star-crossed, lower-class, outcast archetype that sees an abundance of presence in independent films, construct their self-destructive relationship through their self-mastication, and the commitment from the leads transforms the potentially absurd premise to painfully moving romance. The desire to call out to these poor souls literally eating themselves to death never really dissipates.
Far from the fetishization of trichophagia as one would expect, Are We Not Cats places its interest in fetishizing the profundity of squalor in which our protagonists find themselves living. Thanks in part to the intensive, localized, hand-held camera shots that figure Eli in these desolate spaces with stunning composure, degradation is what this film trades in, doing so very well.
Sadly it cannot resist the urge to splash vibrant, high-contrasted lighting to much of these interiors and exteriors, which is an oft-used staple of poverty-chic films, as 2017’s brilliant example in Josh Safdie’s Good Time made clear. Yet despite this minor grievance, the sets, by and large, are impressively designed and shot with a degree of intimacy that makes the seediness of its real-world locations come through directly onto the viewer.
If you were to fault Robin’s film on something it would most likely have to do with the film’s simplicity. Though the depth of the relationship fills out the majority of the film, when it attempts to add dimensions to this element, it traps itself down tangents that feature side characters with a little too much screen time. The dynamic between Eli and Arya is jaded and so fully engaging that any and all characters unfortunate enough to share a scene in what is essentially their movie becomes woefully out of place and distracting.
While our hair-chewing couple are relatively tempered and believable, the rest of the cast function as balmy caricatures to be de-emphasized rather than played up by this cast. Though the film hits its stride when Eli and Arya timidly dance around giving a name to their affliction, anything else having to do with Eli’s search for employment, the lumberyard they are both drawn to, or the other characters who politely hijack the film only detracts from the real intrigue of the central couple.
Even though it is surprisingly short, it is quite easy to get lost in Xander Robin’s weird, wild love story. It’s a directing and writing effort that demonstrates his inherent strengths as a filmmaker lie in his co-opting of an awkward strain of intimacy that can broach the absurd without ever tilting his hand toward it.
Yes, Arya leans over to Eli and takes a bite out of his unkempt coif as if it were a granny smith apple, but Robin doesn’t find this action strange. As a heartfelt talent who bleeds empathy for these two broken isolates, he has no qualms calling that an act of love. It’s this attitude that makes Are We Not Cats an excitingly original film.
