Luca Guadagnino may have divided opinion with his severe, brutalist and Cold War-riddled take on Suspiria, but few would deny his skill with a nightmarish and memorable set-piece. His first feature in four years remains in the horror genre; an adaptation of Camille DeAngelis‘ YA novel Bones & All, here moulded into a twisted romance that’s as gory and as tender as a well-butchered steak. Trusting that the book’s audience will be fine with the most robust of translations from page to screen, this is a solidly adult affair that has moments to shock even the hardened viewer.
Maren (Taylor Russell) is a teenager forced to flee her home in Virginia after she hungrily bites her friend’s finger during a sleepover. Her father abandons her on her 18th birthday, leaving her a cassette tape explaining that she’s always had cannibalistic tendencies, which he’d covered up in childhood. He also leaves her birth certificate, which leads to her beginning a search for her mother, about whom her father always refused to talk. As she makes her way across the country, she meets other ‘eaters’ like herself, principally the creepily eccentric Sully (Mark Rylance), and Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a young man with whom she begins a relationship. Maren and Lee drift through the Midwest as she tries to adapt to her new place in the world and to come to terms with what she is.
Despite Maren’s frantic situation, Bones and All is very much in the tradition of the road movie; languid of pace and often ambient in tone. Maren’s quest to find her mother is almost incidental, as Guadagnino lingers on the pair’s relationship. He utilises Chalamet in largely the same way he did in Call Me By Your Name; he’s slightly ethereal, slightly petulant, slightly androgynous and epicurean. He simply… plays with his food in a different way here. But this is undoubtedly Taylor Russell’s film. The 28-year-old actress is completely convincing as a teenager; naive and fierce, vulnerable and headstrong. We learn of her condition as she does, and we’re plunged into the disorientation of discovering her tendencies followed by her abandonment, and then the giddy thrall of first love with Lee. And this relationship is treated as seriously as their cannibalism, shown with an apocalyptic all-encompassing force. The pair’s hunger for flesh and each other are of the same intensity; to the point you wonder whether they’re going to chew the other’s lips from their face; and it says much for the ferocity of the movie that it wouldn’t be a ridiculous outcome. It links the need to feed a compulsion with the more sensual pleasures of the flesh in a way lacking from a typical cannibal film.
In fact, Bones and All often plays like more like a vampire movie, albeit one in which our tortured souls get to wander in the hazy midwestern daylight rather than hunt at night. Themes of addiction and self-loathing chime with common entries in that genre, with Guadagnino’s examination of sanguine cravings is as if Terrence Malick rather than Abel Ferrara had made The Addiction; sensual wonder and pure carnal id in place of monochrome austerity and aloof superego.
The late-’80s setting increases the sense of isolation for the young lovers. In an era pre-mobile phones, pre-internet, and almost prelapsarian in the pair’s constant distance from anything other than the roughest edges of society, the vastness of the American landscape functions paradoxically as a hiding place almost as secure from detection as the snuggest bolthole. It’s easy to see Maren and Lee existing in the same void that allows Norman Bates to run his hotel in California and for Leatherface to run amok in human skin down in Texas. It’s also the only way that a monster like the twitchy, sinister, and entirely distinctive Sully could have existed as an eater for so long without apprehension.
It’s actually Rylance that seems the most out of place, his performance coming over as overly studied and mannered, which seems at odds with the languid atmosphere and the pains taken for this otherwise fantastical tale to appear as grounded and naturalistic as possible. Of the two men bewitched by Maren, Sully is intended to be the darker yang to Lee’s yin. However the slightly exaggerated nature of the character means that the moral implications of Lee’s behaviour are – if not given a pass – then at least comparatively alleviated. The pair’s tendencies are thrown into even sharper relief when they meet Jake and Brad (Michael Stuhlbarg and David Gordon Green, director of the recent Halloween revivals). Jake is an eater, but Brad reveals he doesn’t suffer cravings, but has simply chosen cannibalism as a lifestyle: the jagged moral edges of an illness or addiction sanded away to pure evil. With Brad subtextually coded as Jake’s catamite, this would posit the pair as a Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole next to Lee and Maren’s Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate.
Languorous, romantic, heady, melancholy, and seedy, Bones and All is a film of real beauty even in the moments of unnerving savagery that punctuate its meandering narrative. Perhaps ten minutes or so could be trimmed, but a slightly extended runtime is more of a feature than a flaw of the format. Like Badlands by way of American Honey it’s a meditation on the limits of freedom and the perils of existence on the fringes of society and basks in its characters, probing for their humanity the more they indulge their animalistic tendencies. It’s great to see a young adult source adapted without being diluted to something safe, sanitised, and – yes, go on then – easy to consume. Full of images, both gorgeous and grotesque, that linger in the mind, it’s a warmer film than Guadagnino’s Suspiria, and despite its inherent monstrousness, far more human.
Screening at cinemas now