Critic Reviews

Zagar, judiciously adapting the book with Daniel Kitrosser, submerges the audience into their world from the outset, presenting a fluid stream of bittersweet and vivid episodes from the family’s life that gradually build into something profound.

Every once in a while a movie grabs you, unsuspecting, and hustles its way into your heart. Jeremiah Zagar’s We the Animals does that. This exquisite debut feature, based on a poetic debut novel by Justin Torres, is a tumbling evocation of a volatile family, narrated by one of three young brothers living in upstate New York with their Puerto Rican father and white mother.

Adapted from Justin Torres’ debut novel from 2011, Zagar’s bravura direction, with a visual style by cinematographer Zak Mulligan, is lyrical and poetic in an approach that would suggest Terence Malick, complete with wistful narration by the film’s young protagonist.

A film that feels like something conjured out of memory and magic, a poetic, often ecstatic re-creation of childhood that captures its ungovernable pleasures as vividly as its most threatening terrors.

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.

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.

Fragile yet resilient, We the Animals has an elemental quality that’s hugely endearing, using air and water and the deep, damp earth to fashion a dreamworld where big changes occur in small, sometimes symbolic ways.

As if by magic, Zagar has managed to foster a sense of familiarity among the boys that sells the illusion that they’re related, further reinforced by the editors’ trick of including moments of spontaneous, unscripted tomfoolery between the young actors.

We the Animals, a stirring portrait of youth, is a requiem for innocence lost.

Dreamy and impressionistic, interspersed with fantastic bursts of animation, We the Animals plays like a gauzy, mesmerizing, half-remembered experience from childhood.