The opening minutes of Bones and All are a diabolical bait and switch. We watch as a quiet high-school wallflower makes a new friend in the Virginia of the 1980s. Maren (Taylor Russell), who lives with her protective single father (Andre Holland) on what you could call the wrong side of the tracks, sneaks out in the middle of the night to attend a sleepover—a familiar, innocent act of teenage rebellion. Immediately, it's clear that she has no social life in this sleepy town. Will she find one in a group of schoolmates opening their door and their lives to the shy girl from the back of the class?
These initial scenes are dreamy and delicate—exactly what some might expect from Luca Guadagnino, the writer-director who set hearts aflutter with his slow-burn Mediterranean romance Call Me By Your Name. And when Maren cozies up to another girl under a coffee table, plainly yearning for intimacy, the uninitiated might wonder if they're in for a queer love story of that ilk, set in the same time period but on a different continent. It's all very lovely… right up until the moment when Maren reveals that she's starved for much more than just connection, in an act of violence so sudden and casually shocking it basically reinvents the movie right before you.
Maren, as it turns out, is an "eater." That is, she belongs to a mysterious race of people afflicted with uncontrollable cannibalistic urges. Years after she first satiated her unnatural cravings as a toddler, making a bloody snack of the babysitter (and a big mess for her dad), that hunger has returned with a vengeance. All of which puts Bones and All in the esteemed company of flesh-munching French art thrillers like Trouble Every Day and Raw, where the urge to chow on long pig becomes a metaphor for appetites carnal, narcotic, or otherwise. Less specifically, what Guadagnino has made is a play on the vampire movie, this one set across a stretch of open country.
Mark Rylance in Bones and All
Yannis Drakoulidis / Metro GoldwynWeary of picking up and starting anew each time someone gets devoured, Maren's father makes the impossible choice to finally cut her loose, leaving behind a cassette laying out the horrors she's committed and forgotten. (It's a blatantly expository device redeemed by Holland's affecting voice-over performance.) Suddenly on her own, Maren goes in search of her long-estranged mother—a journey that gives Bones and All the episodic structure of a road movie. That's another cinematic tradition Guadagnino is locking into: the American picaresque as seen through a touristing European's eyes. (Perhaps appropriately, the movie is a bit cannibalistic itself, picking from the bones of countless worthy predecessors dotting a landscape that stretches from horror to crime picture to neo-Western.)
Through these travels, we're welcomed into a secret network of ravenous outlaws, of vagabond monsters walking among their prey, living meal to sinful meal, always on the run, and occasionally crossing paths. One of them is played by Mark Rylance, doing an especially gamey Southern accent as an old head of the eater lifestyle whose folksy paternal affectation can't entirely dispel the feeling that he's much more trouble than he lets on. (It's tough to seem completely nonthreatening, after all, when you're drenched in blood.) Later on, Michael Stuhlbarg appears for a subtly menacing cameo that fiendishly subverts the warm, welcoming decency he so memorably exuded for Guadagnino in Call Me By Your Name.
Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet in Bones and All
Yannis Drakoulidis / Metro GoldwynFrom that cast, the director has also plucked his young star, Timothée Chalamet, who appears here as Lee, the most swaggering and attractive of the sorta-vamps Maren encounters along the way. (That Chalamet got famous playing love interest to Armie Hammer, whose career was torpedoed by accusations of a violent cannibalistic fetish, is an uncomfortable parallel that might actually benefit a movie aiming for discomfort.) It's with the introduction of this young cowboy drifter—a bohemian flesh junkie who's rationalized his murdering ways—that Bones and All slides into a desperado romance with a few shades of Kathyrn Bigelow's towering Near Dark. Is anything in the film firsthand? Its needle drops, at least, feel quintessentially Guadagnino. From whom else might we expect the memeable image of Chalamet boogieing to Kiss?
For a good long while, Bones and All is rather outstanding—an equally seductive and sinister scavenging of genre touchstones. What lends it a pulse is the lingering threat of bloodshed beneath the puppy love. Will Lee corrupt Maren? The conflict seems to hinge on her reluctance to embrace what she is; while so many coming-of-ages dramas extol the virtue of being yourself, here's one that sees nothing but terror and guilt down that road of self-acceptance. We know, after all, what it looks like when Maren indulges. That early shock hangs over the whole film, lending it a perpetual suspense reinforced by an unusually twangy score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, as well as memories of past Guadagnino grotesqueries. His last movie, remember, was the remake of Suspiria, which punctuated its pretentious revisions to a classic with some truly gnarly mutilation.
In a sense, Bones and All splits the difference between that film and Call Me By Your Name, equally committed as it is to the innocent rapture of its young lovers and the genuine threat they pose to the world. Pity that the movie can't maintain that balance. At a certain point, it becomes clear that Guadagnino believes, too earnestly, in the love story between these roving cannibal paramours. And the danger begins to seep from the movie like blood from a punctured artery, until what remains bears few traces of moral ambiguity, and a vibe that's perilously close to a Levis commercial. That's the real bait and switch of the movie: Gore aside, it is, by the end, a tale of outlaw amour without much genuine bite.
Bones and All is now playing in theaters everywhere.
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