I saw one press tag referring to Bones and All as a horror romance. Or it could be called a cannibal coming-of-age film. I can say with certainty that it won’t be for everyone. When the credits rolled at the advance screening, one woman behind me declared, “That was the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen!”. But I liked it for its muted tone and the performances.
The film takes place in 1988 and is about a woman, Maren played by Taylor Russell, who has just turned eighteen and has a compulsion to consume human flesh. Her mother is out of the picture, and her father has moved her from town to town to outrun the consequences of her actions. Soon Maren is setting off on a road trip by herself to figure out where she fits in the world. She eventually meets Lee, played by Timothée Chalamet, who also exists in constant motion at the edges of society.
Italian director Luca Guadagnino, best known for Call Me By Your Name, maintains a leisurely pace that is punctuated by sudden violence. Similarly, the photography is mostly naturalistic without a lot of fancy camerawork until the moments of danger, where the change in technique is effective in heightening the tension. Where Call Me By Your Name was set in beautiful northern Italy, Bones and All takes place across the United States from Virginia to Minnesota in bus stops, trailer homes, and campgrounds. But Guadagnino photographs these places, and the vast spaces in between them, just as lovingly. The film begins with close-ups of watercolors of power lines that pass over a small town painted by the local high schoolers. It’s unclear to me why the kids are so into painting power lines, but it sets the mood.
The two other movies that Bones and All reminds me of are Winter’s Bone and Blue Ruin. Winter’s Bone is about a young woman navigating a rural world laced with violence to find out what happened to her father. Blue Ruin is about a man damaged by violence in his past who travels across states to confront it again. But it is the tone of these three which I find most similar, where we view the world through these character’s somewhat naïve eyes, not sure of who to trust or where sudden violence will come from. But to be clear, both Winter’s Bone and Blue Ruin are better films than Bones and All, because both had a sturdier plot and more definitive resolution.
I haven’t talked too much about the plot of the film because the trailers don’t disclose much, and it’s best to go into the movie as unprepared as our main character for what she will find. As a coming-of-age film, though, we know we will have Maren becoming wiser to the ways of the world, forming her character where her actions conflict with her ideals, and being channeled and challenged in her growth by her first love. In this case, it just happens to revolve around cannibalism. I’m going to talk about the ending of the movie in the next paragraph, not in specifics, but in generalities related to the theme. But if you are very spoiler-phobic, go ahead and skip forward.
The ending of the film disappoints because, although Maren has been through a lot, it’s not clear how she has changed. As you might imagine, feeding on human flesh sets up many ethical dilemmas, and Maren wrestles with them in the film. Her lover and others she meets challenge her views, but we aren’t given a glimpse of the woman she might become. Instead, the movie sidesteps this and dives instead into the depths of love’s devotion, which is similar to any other number of weepies, and disappointing for a film that had otherwise so distinguished itself by crossing genres.
There’s a chance that the film felt like it could avoid these questions because it saw cannibalism as a metaphor for intimacy, just like vampirism is conflated with lust and possession. Even more literally, you could read it as a metaphor for homosexuality. The movie takes place in Reagan’s 80’s (there’s even a speech by him heard on a car radio) , and the practitioners of cannibalism, while recognizing each other, disguise themselves to the “normal” world and rely on their own unwritten codes to navigate within it. But the visceral horror of the cannibalism and the practical dilemmas presented would be done a disservice by just writing them off as metaphorical.
My problems with resolution, however, are outweighed by the journey itself, which mostly maintains its tension and dread balanced against the story of two people finding each other. The matter-of-fact presentation of the horror elements give you the feeling they can crash in upon the world created by the young lovers at any time. Russell and Chalamet are both very good and needed to be to carry this material. Mark Rylance is also memorable in his role. Although he goes a little farther out there in his performance, as a supporting character he does his job to make the big scary world a little scarier. The movie isn’t for everyone, but it is has a confident presentation of a bleak world that could be a great antidote for otherwise sugary holiday entertainment.
Das Fressen 