Chelsea Lopez, Michael Patrick Nicholson
“ARE WE NOT CATS” My rating: C+
78 minutes | No MPAA rating
“Are We Not Cats” is a slacker love story.
Or maybe it’s a horror yarn centering on the human equivalent of a cat’s hairball.
The answer is up to the individual. Some viewers will be weirdly moved by writer/director Xander Robin’s short (only 78 minutes) debut feature. Others will be totally grossed out and repelled.
The film’s first half hour centers on Eli (Michael Patrick Nicholson), a hapless twentysomething adrift in the scuzziest corners of New York City.
In short order Eli is rejected by his girl, loses his job as a trash hauler and is abandoned by his parents, who unceremoniously decamp to Arizona. He’s reduced to sleeping in the ramshackle delivery truck which is his sole means of making money.
Even if we hadn’t seen Eli’s world imploding around him, we’d know he was in the grip of a big-time existential dilemma. His unkempt hair, untended chin bristles and haunted eyes announce a dude in crisis. Told he looks tired, Eli can only shrug: “This is what I look like.”
Desperate for cash, he takes a job driving a massive truck motor to a customer upstate. Along the way he gives a ride to Kyle (Michael Godere), who takes him to a sort of underground nightclub for rural punks and introduces him to his girl, Anya (Chelsea Lopez), a naifish beauty with black lipstick and a wig concealing her bald pate.
Cancer patient? No. Anya suffers from trichotillomania and trichophagia — she is compelled to pull out her own hair and eat it.
Nonetheless, she and Eli drift into a semi-romantic relationship…at least until the massive hairball in Anya’s intestinal tract creates a health crisis that requires improvised surgery.
The film’s title references not only the line chanted by the animal men in the classic horror movie “The Island of Lost Souls” (“Are we not men?”) but to Anya’s unhappy hairball.
In a sense this is two movies. The first is a sort of deadpan ashcan comedy as Eli drifts through a world of crumbling buildings and rusting, abandoned heavy machinery.
Then the oddball romance kicks in, only to be twisted inside out by one of the most gruesome scenes in recent movie memory.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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