Bones and All (2022)
dir. Luca Guadagnino
Rated: R
image: ©2022 MGM
“For a minute. Just a minute. You made it feel like home.”
Those are the final words we hear in the last seconds of Bones and All, the new film from director Luca Guadagnino. With a quiet, contemplative score by duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, those words, sung by the Nine Inch Nails front man Reznor, cut right to the bloody, visceral heart of Guadagnino’s picture.
No matter what you hear about the movie – it features graphic violence and vivid depictions of cannibalism – its real power lies in capturing the almost ineffable experience of finding a sense of home, belonging, trust, and deep love in another human being. Bones and All is about finding in someone else that illusive sense of home in an inhospitable, cruel world.
It’s a testament to Guadagnino’s mastery of tone, that mysterious element in movies, that the filmmaker is able to craft a delicate, moving love story amid all the carnage. His movie demands radical empathy, because its heroes are, by any societal measure, monsters. “The world of love wants no monsters in it,” according to one character in the film. Guadagnino makes the case in Bones and All that we need to make room for the monsters, too. If we do, we might find that what society considers monstrous is, in reality, people looking for what we all want, love and understanding.
Based on a 2015 novel of the same name by author Camille DeAngelis, Bones and All tells the story of Maren, a girl with a peculiar and horrific need. Maren learns that her father, Frank, has been counting down the days to her 18th birthday, so that he can rationalize – in his own mind – abandoning his only daughter in order to escape her destructive and murderous desires.
Frank leaves an audio cassette tape for Maren – the movie is set in the late 1980s – in which he narrates to his daughter descriptions of the attacks she has committed that she was too young to remember. Her first victim was a babysitter. Another was a young boy at a summer camp Maren excitedly attended in her early adolescence.
Each time little Maren indulged in her unspeakable hunger for human flesh, which she herself, with no guidance from anyone else, barely understands, her father would pack up as much as could be thrown into their car in a matter of minutes and move them hundreds of miles away. They would adopt new names in an effort to stay one step ahead of law enforcement.
It’s not hard to imagine what drew Guadagnino to the project. As an out queer man – my introduction to his work was 2017’s sublime queer love story Call Me By Your Name – he undoubtedly saw the connection between the societal taboo of cannibalism with that of queer desire. A not-insignificant portion of the population would likely equate the two practices as equally abhorrent.
Screenwriter David Kajganich adapted DeAngelis’s novel. Kajganich is a frequent Guadagnino collaborator, having written the screenplays for the director’s 2015 film A Bigger Splash and his 2018 remake of Dario Argento’s giallo horror cult-classic Suspiria. I’m not sure if the connections to queer desire are as explicit in DeAngelis’s novel – I haven’t read it – or if rewrites after Guadagnino got involved shifted the focus. Either way, focusing on the blossoming love story between two cannibals is a not-so-subtle way of confronting how society treats love that it finds too transgressive.
On the morning he disappears for good, Maren’s father leaves for his daughter, in addition to the cassette tape confession, some cash and her birth certificate. Listed on the birth certificate is the town where Maren was born and her mother’s name. Since she has no memories of her mother, and in the hope that this mysterious part of her history might explain to her what she is, Maren decides to trek cross country to find out if her mom is still alive.
At first, Maren thinks she’s the only one with this inexplicable craving for human flesh. (Again, the similarity to queer desire – how many LGBTQ+ kids thought they were the only one with strange feelings in the days before homosexuality was more openly discussed? – is fairly explicit.)
After buying a bus ticket to get to the town listed on her birth certificate, Maren waits for its arrival, passing the time by reading a book. Guadagnino and Kajganich preserve, subtly, a character trait which I’m sure is more pronounced in the novel. It’s not discussed in much detail in the movie, but Maren clearly loves to escape into books. We see her reading any number of them throughout the movie. (Clan of the Cave Bear and a Tolkien novel are the few that I caught.)
While she waits for the bus, Maren notices a man staring at her from a distance in the early morning hours. The much older man calls himself Sully, and he says he could smell Maren from half a mile away. Sully is an eater. He can smell other eaters, as well as dead or dying human flesh, and he tells Maren that she will be able to do the same with enough time and practice. Sully lives his life by a set of rules, the most important being never, ever eat an eater.
Except Sully acts a little too strange for Maren’s comfort. After the two feed on an old woman whom Sully sniffed out dying alone in her own house, he shows his new companion the rope braid he’s made out of the hair of each one of his victims. It’s a way for him to remember each one, he tells her.
Maren slips out of the house while Sully takes a shower. (True to horror movie tradition, the eating scenes are extremely messy affairs, often featuring the characters biting directly into the bodies of their victims, with buckets of blood smeared across their mouths and chests.)
Maren meets another eater on her odyssey across the American landscape. His name is Lee and he’s only a few years older than Maren. In one of the rare comedic moments of Bones and All, Lee is dumbfounded when Maren describes Sully’s ritualistic human hair rope. “That’s a choice,” Lee deadpans to his new companion.
This throwaway moment speaks again to the LGBTQ+ connection of the film; from what I understand, there is beginning to be a generational divide between LGBTQ+ folks who grew up indoctrinated with self-hatred for their sexual orientation and the younger LGBTQ+ community who are growing up in a much more accepting environment.
The two fine young cannibals – sorry, I couldn’t resist – forge a deep emotional connection throughout their odyssey. They become each other’s home. Over the course of the movie’s 130 minutes, we move from Virginia, to Maryland, to Ohio, to Missouri as both Maren and Lee confront their pasts and their families. For Maren, it’s trying to find her mother. For Lee, it’s the sister he left behind a few years earlier, after an ugly confrontation with their abusive father. She can’t understand why Lee stays on the road, and he, in turn, can never explain the reason to her.
Taylor Russell gives a haunted performance as Maren. The Canadian actress is best known for her work in the Escape Room horror films as well as her role as Judy Robinson in the Netflix reboot of the TV series Lost in Space. In Bones and All, Russell evinces a frightened vulnerability as Maren that gives us an anchor as we journey through this bizarre, unsettling world.
Timothée Chalamet reteams with his Call Me by Your Name director to deliver the tough-as-nails Lee. There’s a lot going on underneath Lee’s gruff exterior, and Chalamet doles out enough interiority, at exactly the right moments, to forge a connection with the audience. When Lee asks Maren, “Am I a bad person?”, after describing his most brutal behavior, we feel the turmoil roiling within him.
During their journey, Maren and Lee encounter many strange characters. They meet Jake and Brad, a pair of fellow eaters who unsettle our heroes, particularly Maren. Brad has an additional secret that Maren can’t comprehend, which mirrors our own revulsion. Filmmaker David Gordon Green – best known for his trilogy in the Halloween franchise and his work with Danny McBride – plays Brad, and he channels the creepiness of someone like Hannibal Lecter in the minuscule role. Michael Stuhlbarg absolutely steals the movie for five minutes as Jake. You can’t take your eyes off of him any second that he’s on the screen. Stuhlbarg’s delivery of Jake’s campfire tale of how he met Brad is horrific and mesmerizing.
As unsettling as that pair is, they can’t compare to Mark Rylance’s truly unhinged Sully. We see Sully three times throughout Bones and All. Each one is more unsettling than the last. Costume design – most notably the long braid that Sully himself sports – and performance – Rylance’s creepy southern drawl does most of the heavy lifting – work together to create the most horrifying movie character of recent memory.
The last time old Sully turns up feels a bit too much like a contrivance for the plot’s sake, but it results in one of the most emotionally moving climaxes of the year. Bones and All is a journey with characters who, if you open yourself up to radical empathy, demand your compassion. Compassion for people who are nothing like oneself is one of humanity’s greatest traits. As he did with Call Me by Your Name, Luca Guadagnino once again explores the wonder of human compassion and love to heartbreaking effect.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- This comes down to tone for me. Guadagnino is incredibly adept at creating a mood. Even his remake of Susperia, which has its problems, has a campy, creepy vibe all it’s own.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Guadagnino uses an archival clip of then-US Attorney Rudy Giuliani early in the movie. It sickens me to see that dude pretty much anywhere these days, but Guadagnino’s choice as a way to subtly hint at the time setting of Bones and All is clever and memorable.
- André Holland, whom I swooned for in Moonlight, has a fleeting cameo as Maren’s father.
- I didn’t delve much into Guadagnino’s visual aesthetic in the review, but his use of dissolves, smash cuts, and extreme close-ups (especially one right before a brutal murder) are inspired.
- I wrote this review only hours after a mass shooting occurred at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, CO. I wrote that there is a generational divide beginning to separate LGBTQ+ folks old enough to remember when homosexuality couldn’t even be talked about compared to younger LGBTQ+ folks who grew up in a, by comparison, much more accepting society. Obviously, the LGBTQ+ community still faces violence and threats every single day. While things have gotten better for a huge swath of the community, ignorant hatred will unfortunately be something they have to face for the foreseeable future. The Club Q atrocity is only one more horrific reminder of why a film like Bones and All is so important.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Like last week’s review, this is another movie I was able to screen at Fantastic Fest 2022, but I needed to see it a second time, so that my memories of it were fresh when I sat down to collect my thoughts about it. As the Fantastic Fest screening happened at an Alamo Drafthouse, I thought I would be cute and order their carnivore pizza to eat while I watched the movie. Then the presenter came out to introduce the film. She said that, in addition to her crying on her first screening, that Bones and All was “the most disturbing film programmed at the fest this year.” I quickly snatched the order card for my pizza from the table, just in case. Turns out, that was a wise decision. The second screening was a press/promotional screening that was packed. The audience seemed to be on board, but, this movie is a tough sit, so the stunned looks as everyone exited was to be expected. Bones and All is currently available in wide theatrical release.