The teenagers of We Are Who We Are-third culture kids raised on military bases, mostly in Italy-throw all the tantrums and fits you might expect, but their transgressions are more normative and rebellious than self-abusive and medicinal. They probably make your grandma nostalgic or nauseous and nothing in between.īut Guadagnino’s series (which the Italian-born director both wrote and directed) feels like a much more mature version of the adapted Call Me by Your Name-and it exchanges the somewhat awkward and fantastical romancing of that film for a world that feels more real, more lived in, and more relevant.Īs for the Euphoria angle-sure, there's lots of drinking and smoking and hooking up, but it’s not shown here in Euphoria’s more destructive form. All three works feature mid-teen protagonists (many of whom are non-binary) fraught with mid teen stress-peers, puberty, and, for one, peaches.

The critical urge to compare Luca Guadagnino’s latest project We Are Who We Are (an eight-episode series on HBO) to one of his recent films, Call Me by Your Name, and to HBO’s previous Gen-Z coming of age, Euphoria, will be unconquerable.

Luca guadagnino we are who we are