Bones and All

An impulsive misfit finds true love with a mysterious drifter in the bizarrely romantic horror-road movie Bones and All. The film echoes Claire Denis’ cannibal love story Trouble Every Day with many shades of Terrence Malick’s 1973 masterpiece Badlands, and this intoxicating adaptation of travel writer Camille DeAngelis’ bestselling novel of the same name is impeccably crafted by Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino, who continues his merger of horror and drama four years after his haunting and equally divisive Suspiria. Like Badlands and many other films that came after (True Romance, Natural Born Killers), the film is a gruesome portrait about two outsiders who go on a cross country road trip, Guadagnino’s film has an ironic and irregular mix of horror and effective romance where the drama ignites just as much as any Oscar bait movie that’s out right now.

Like Denis’s Trouble Every Day, Bones and All is also inspired by vampire lore in many ways. The characters keep their dangerous love of blood and human flesh to themselves, they lock themselves away from society until they get a craving, then they blend in with society. In this film, they can even sense and smell each other’s presence from miles away—an implausible plot detail that’s so easy to forgive because of just how elegant and artfully crafted Guadagnino’s craft really is. Let’s not forget, masters like De Palma, Hitchcock, and Tarantino also have ridiculous aspects to each of their films, but the power of great filmmaking and the cinematic experience it brings can really take a film a long way.

Just like his remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 horror masterpiece Suspiria, Guadagnino proves once again that he has a passion and knack for horror filmmaking. This is such an unusual career move and trait for Guadagnino, who spent most of his career directing films in his native countryside on hot summer days that include A Bigger Splash as well as such masterpieces as I Am Love and Call Me By Your Name, which still remain his two greatest accomplishments. There are many bursts of sudden violence interspersed with long stretches of human drama, as well as some extremely gruesome scenes of characters devouring necks and limbs off bodies as if they were vampires or zombies. The flesh coming off the body will make you squirm (but after Terrifier 2 who knows anymore?), and in the aftermath, there is blood everywhere, including an electrifying climax. The cannibalism here might not be as abstract as Denis Trouble Every Day, but it can still be used as a metaphor for alienation, and how there is someone out there who can empathize with one’s odd peculiarities, and, at its core, it’s about two troubled people bonding together with their immoral and deeply unethical cravings.

With the title, marketing, adaptation of the novel, and description, it might sound like Bones and All is a straight up horror film released this Thanksgiving. While Timothee Chalamet is a great talent and one of the greatest young actors so far of his generation, he’s not quite the draw yet the way Leonardo Di Caprio was. Many diehard horror fans of recent films like Barbarian, Black Phone, Smile, and Terrifier 2 will probably not be as interested in the film due to its slow-burn execution, and there are many moments throughout the film where the drama ignites as the visuals flourish. The film should certainly satisfy mature horror audiences looking for more depth with their gore, and it should hopefully please indie film fans as well because it embodies many of Guadagnino’s art-house sensibilities. Guadagnino’s exquisitely shot seventh feature works across the board as a poetic road movie, a sensual romance, and finally, as a brooding horror movie.

The film starts off with our young protagonist, Maren (Taylor Russell), who is 18 years old and in her senior year of high school. She lives with her father, Frank (Andre Holland), in their small-town home in the late 80s. We notice she lives closed in at her house, as her father locks the door from the outside and her windows require a screwdriver to open. She ends up sneaking out once Frank falls asleep after she’s invited for a sleepover with one of her classmates. During the sleepover, the girls are having fun and showing off their brand-new nail polish, Marin ends up taking a bite off one of her classmates and chomping it right off, as blood drips from her mouth and the classmates finger is halfway gone.

Maren retreats to her home, and her father is very alarmed. This appears to have happened before, and as Frank prepares to pack up and flee before the cops arrive, he comes to a halt and decides to stay back and usher her out. She is given some cash with a cassette tape that gives details on what Maren needs to do, who she really is, and how he can’t continue to protect her from her thirst for blood and human flesh. Maren finds herself fending for herself in the outside world, and only has a few hundred dollars to get her by.

After catching a bus, she ends up in a small town where she encounters an eccentric man named Sully (Mark Rylance), who sports a hat with feathers and has a ponytail. Sully explains that he can smell her, and it doesn’t take long to realize he’s a fellow cannibal. He tells her he has a fresh meal upstairs. What would have been overly graphic and sensationalized by many other horror filmmakers is what follows next, Guadagnino cuts away from the grisly devouring of an elderly woman who is already dead. Instead of showing the feast, Guadagnino cuts the camera to photos of the victim, who is with her family on a vacation in her early years, to show that her life held some meaning while she was alive. Even though Sully appears to be a “kind” cannibal that only feasts on humans that are already dead, he still gives off odd vibes to Maren, with whom she cautiously parts ways in a polite fashion.

Maren continues to drift away throughout the Midwest. She finds herself in Ohio and locks eyes with Lee (Chalamet) at a grocery store. Lee wears a fedora and wears peculiar clothes. He is also a cannibal who kills people with no remorse. He is also running away from family troubles in Kentucky. They end up bonding, and eventually they find themselves falling in love due to their emotional and survival needs. Maren has a stronger moral conviction about how to satisfy her craving, and she certainly does not approve of killing humans. Lee has many dark traumas and childhood abuses that led to his addiction to human flesh; he has no remorse and is frequently bloodthirsty, killing humans to satisfy his hunger. With all the grisly feasting, Chalamet and Russell are absolutely intimate and sensual in their scenes together. Whether it’s in small moments where he dances and sings to Lick It Up by Kiss or all their romantic exchanges in the countryside, their human connection truly ignites, as odd or ridiculous as that might sound.

The film becomes a very idiosyncratic and bizarre love story, but it also holds some sharp character depth as well. Maren desperately wants to know where her roots are. She travels across the Midwest with Lee in an old pickup truck in search of her mother. Maren and Lee’s travelogue leads her to Minnesota, where she finds her mother (Chloe Sevigny) living in a mental hospital, where she discovers that she is also a cannibal who chewed off her own hand. It’s a very eerie scene, and Sevigny is nearly unrecognizable and chilling.

There are many other great moments in the film where characters fade in and out. Michael Stuhlbarg effectively plays a hick in overalls who reveals himself to be a cannibal, with David Gordon Greene playing his beer drinking buddy who wants to get into cannibalism, and Jessica Harper, who plays Maren’s adoptive grandmother, has a standout scene. Another effective scene in the film involves Lee flirting with a carnival worker who he meets in a cornfield, thinking it’s a quick hook-up, only to find himself becoming a feast for Lee’s blood thirst. This changes Maren’s entire perspective on how unethical it is to eat human flesh and how Lee needs to develop more compassion, in which his love for Maren pulls him away from senseless killing.

Production values are extraordinary: everything looks artful, and the “Eighties” time period is always convincing. The Midwest landscapes are just as lush as any Terrence Malick film, and the film’s elliptical beauty is transcended only more by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s ethereal score, which consists of mostly acoustic guitars and strings and is both romantic and unnerving within the melodies. The score is up there with the work by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis in Blonde as being one of the most notable scores of the year.

While there is so much poetic beauty to be found, many will inevitably dismiss the script’s implausibility issues. Plot detectives and screenplay aficionados will argue the script asks a lot in its plausibility where Maren meets two cannibals throughout the course of her journey in just one week, but again, they can somehow smell each other in David Kajganich’s screenplay (who also co-wrote Guadagnino’s Suspiria and A Bigger Splash). The films script isn’t its strongest suit, it’s really like trying to pick apart the inconsistencies of a Brian De Palma film, but what works here is the execution of Guadagnino’s direction, along with the lush cinematography by Arseni Khachaturan. The woozy aesthetic bounces between being evocative and grueling. The film’s climax could very well be the most unnerving and intense scene of the year, where everyone ends up confronting (literally) and paying a price for their primal nature.

There is an uncompromising tenderness and odd beauty to Bones and All, Guadagnino brings layers and many depths to his troubled characters doing repugnant things, but he finds the moral conundrums, deep layers, and eventually a moral compass in the material. We are left with two very compelling characters who are left to fend for themselves in a very cruel world as they attempt to reinvent themselves with their repressed compulsions. Visually alluring, technically accomplished, unflinching, and evocative, as the credits roll, there will be no denying that Bones and All is one of the most unforgettable experiences of the year.