"Once under way, We Are What We Are is a long journey through an urban miasma to the end of a dark and bloody night, a modernist score adding to the anxiety around the invariably messy kills. This is a movie in which mise-en-scène trumps the suspense. Played out in shadowy streets, dilapidated overhead highways, grime-encrusted underpasses, and fetid clubs, We Are What We Are seems an organic product of Mexico City's teeming sprawl. (There's a hint of Buñuel's Los Olvidados in its life-feeding-on-life Darwinian struggle.) The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls—or rather tonelessly chanted on a rattling train in a sequence providing the movie's appropriately off-key lyrical interlude" - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice