Critic Reviews

An intense, exhilarating queer melodrama that evolves, recombines and finally crystallizes its director and cowriter’s pleasure principle into one of the year’s best TV series.

It takes a daring director to ask us to not just sympathise but empathise with a boy like Fraser. And Guadagnino is certainly that. He has an almost magical realist take on teenage life. Everything is at once lifelike and heightened, his gritty, gonzo approach punctured by freeze frames and fade-outs and fantasy sequences. ... The more you watch, the more that shrug of a title starts to make sense.

With half the episodes yet to be seen, “We Are Who We Are” could go in a lot of different directions, but it already feels bursting with life in the way great television often does. You want to live alongside these characters for as long as they’ll let you, and for as shrewdly as Guadagnino doles out key details, there’s nothing fast about this loving look at developing souls. Whether you want to read poetry or swim under the Italian sun, “We Are Who We Are” gives you everything you could hope for. Kick back and enjoy.

This story is contemporary, lively, and breathtakingly human, dwelling in the awkwardness of teenage exploration and sensation with an honesty that is at times painful. It is Guadagnino’s talent to make this sprawling, uncomfortable period of life into something that reads, onscreen, as poignant and beautiful.

An eight-part opus that is guaranteed to stand as an essential work in the director’s oeuvre.

Could you dismiss We Are Who We Are as weird, arty nonsense? Sure. Is it the kind of show that's going to give you everything up front or let plotlines simmer under the surface? Definitely the latter. Will you walk away from episodes with more questions than you came with? Probably. But that's all part of what makes it hella tight, in the words of an aforementioned teen icon. So let yourself obsess over We Are Who We Are, because it's the kind of show your teen self would've felt seen by, and you should honor that kid every chance you get.

Despite some flat characters, Guadagnino exuberantly spotlights his cast of up-and-comers, especially Corey Knight as a sweetheart soldier with star-spangled boxer briefs. ... Has there ever been a military base this radiant with hedonistic pansexual yearning? I don’t believe it, but these kids are alright.

Grazer, who played Eddie the young hypochondriac in It, hits every complicated note about Fraser, who at times can seem incredibly wise and at others a scarred, volatile kid trying and failing to seem much more worldly than he actually is. Newcomer Seamón, meanwhile, is a real find: Caitlin has a different identity (and, at times, a different name) for every person in her life, but can be just as raw and vulnerable as Fraser, if not more.

An aura of pleasant aimlessness suffuses the production, its evocation of eternal summer mirroring the teens’ approach to their here-but-not-really-ness. But of course the scripts (by Guadagnino, Paolo Giordano and Francesca Manieri) are meticulously crafted, guided in large part by the steady unearthing of the characters’ layers.

The series is at its most emotionally resonant while tracking that oxymoronic intersection of lazy spontaneity in which teenagers live. So it’s both interesting and disappointing that “We Are Who We Are” doesn’t seem to quite know who its adults are. ... As the series continues, it will be telling to see how the scripts handle the ongoing stories, which are largely (purposefully) nebulous. But in the early going, “We Are Who We Are” is an emotive portrait of makeshift community, bravado and life.