Bones and All (2022) poster

Bones and All (2022)

Rating:


Italy/UK. 2022.

Crew

Director – Luca Guadagnino, Screenplay – David Kajganich, Based on the Novel by Camille DeAngelis, Producers – Timothee Chalamet, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, Luca Guadagnino, David Kajganich, Lorenzo Mieli, Gabriele Moratii, Marco Morabito, Theresa Park & Peter Spears, Photography – Arseni Khachaturan, Music – Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, Visual Effects – Alps Studio (Supervisors – Alessio Bertotti & Filippo Robino) & Frame by Frame, Prosthetic Makeup – Jason Hamer, Production Design – Elliott Hostetter. Production Company – Frenesy Film Company/Per Capita Productions/The Apartment Pictures/3Marys Entertainment/Elafilm/Tenderstories.

Cast

Taylor Russell (Maren Yearly), Timothee Chalamet (Lee), Mark Rylance (Sully), Andre Holland (Frank Yearly), Jessica Harper (Barbara Kerns), Chloe Sevigny (Janelle Kerns), David Gordon Green (Brad), Michael Stuhlberg (Jake), Jake Horowitz (Booth Man), Kendle Coffey (Sherry), Anna Cobb (Kayla), Ellie Parker (Jackie), Madeleine Hall (Kim)


Plot

Virginia, 1988. Eighteen year-old Maren Yearly is in high school, while being raised by her father Frank. She sneaks out to join three friends for a slumber party but in the midst of this is driven to bite off another girl’s finger. Her father immediately gets Maren to pack up and leave. They settle in a different town but he abandons her there. He leaves a tape recording telling how she killed and ate the flesh of her babysitter when she was three years old. Knowing she would do so again, he cannot go through with this again. Maren begins wandering. Outside a Greyhound station, she meets Sully, who tells her she is a fellow Eater who needs to subsist by devouring human flesh. However, Maren finds Sully creepy and leaves. In Indiana, she falls in with Lee, another Eater, and they travel together and eventually become involved. Through all of this, Maren searches for her mother, while having difficulty dealing with the fact that what she is requires her to murder.


Luca Guadagnino is an Italian director who first appeared with the non-genre likes of The Protagonists (1999), Melissa P. (2005), I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash (2015), as well as several documentaries. The work that gained Guadagnino international attention was the gay Coming of Age story Call Me By Your Name (2017), which received an Academy Award Best Film nomination. Guadagnino first entered the horror genre with his not uninteresting remake of Suspiria (2018).

The script is from David Kajganich, who previously wrote Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash and Suspiria. Kajganich seems to specialise in genre material with his scripts for The Invasion (2007), Town Creek (2009) and the tv series of Dan Simmons’ The Terror (2018-9). The film is adapted from a 2016 novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis.

Camille DeAngelis’s novel is a Young Adult work, although when it comes to the film one is hard-pressed to place it in the same category. It is Young Adult in the sense that it features teenage protagonists and is a Coming of Age story. (For all that it is a film about two central characters that are teenagers, it should be noted that Taylor Russell is 28 and Timothee Chalamet 27 as the film comes out).

Luca Guadagnino’s tone is not the usual stuff of Young Adult. He has a love for the great American landscape and much of the film is about following the two characters as they drift through the Midwest in search of answers and meaning. It is more Road Movie than it is Young Adult. In tone the film resembles something of American Honey (2016), particularly when it keeps its focus on a downbeat, often working class America and the banal places of Greyhound stations, convenience stores and trailer park lots. I kept also being reminded of Terrence Malick’s great American Pastorale Badlands (1973) with its two teenage criminals drifting through a landscape in search of meaning/redemption.

Lee (Timothee Chalamet) and Maren (Taylor Russell) in Bones and All (2022)
Lee (Timothee Chalamet) and Maren (Taylor Russell)

Bones and All is a film about cannibalism. There have been a good many films on the topic – I have a listing of these here at Films About Cannibalism. The nearest of these Bones and All comes close to is Raw (2016) where university student Garance Marillier gains a taste for human flesh. In both, there is the suggestion that the cannibalism the protagonist heroine suffers from is some kind of inherited, genetic condition – although neither explores this any more than that. If anything, the film resembles something of Eat Brains Love (2019), a lightweight Young Adult work made by Timothee Chalamet’s uncle Rodman Flender about a zombie boyfriend-girlfriend and their reconciliation with their new flesh-eating nature. Maybe Eat Brains Love with the aesthetic of Badlands.

Bones and All is an evocative film. It is more Coming of Age story and character journey than it is a horror film, but Luca Guadagnino does not neglect this side either. There is a particularly jolting scene early on where we follow the ordinary, everyday stuff of Taylor Russell’s school life and her sneaking out to go to a slumber party only to abruptly bite her friend’s finger.

Taylor Russell, the find who emerged through tv’s Lost in Space (2018-21) and Escape Room (2019), is a quietly understated strength of the film. I am not a huge fan of Timothee Chalamet, a name who is big at the moment – all his performances seem to come with an underlying sense of superiority, as though he seems to consider himself above the average person. I would like him a lot more as an actor if he went more out of his way to shake this weedy preppiness and actually engage as an actor. On the other hand, one of the great joys of the film is Mark Rylance, who gives a wonderfully creepy performance as Sully.

(Nominee for Best Supporting Actor (Mary Rylance) at this site’s Best of 2022 Awards).


Trailer here


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