Bones and All (Guadagnino, 2022)

Luca Guadagnino is often grouped with a stable of other fiery directors of a new generation, like Ari Aster, David Lowery, Yorgos Lanthimos, Alex Garland and Robert Eggers, among others. They’re filmmakers who know their way around a startling or resonant image. The best work from this stable – like The Lobster, The Witch or Hereditary, or indeed Guadagnino’s own Call Me By Your Name, are testament to the importance of pairing such visuals with an excellent script. In Call Me By Your Name’s case, it is as much the work of nonagenarian James Ivory’s sprightly yet immensely wise writing as it is Guadagnino’s lush direction that conjures the film’s alluring, intoxicating spell. The chorus of the two is what makes the film both of-the-moment and timeless, as all great romances are. Elsewhere in Guadagnino’s career, the Italian’s visuals and direction of actors are next-to-none – but from Suspiria to A Bigger Splash, Guadagnino has been hindered by screenplays that are either overburdened by ambition or peter out before the telling is done. 

Reuniting director and star of one of the great 21st Century romances, Call Me By Your Name, cannibal romance Bones and All is a handsome and suitably gruesome road trip steeped in the Americana of visionaries like Terrence Malick and Wim Wenders. Full of resplendent, bloody visuals, there’s a certain lack of visceral feeling at the heart of this love story that leaves the viewer slightly wanting. 

In the case of Bones and All, the long-awaited reunion of the director and star of Call Me By Your Name, Guadagnino’s direction is typically vivacious and often remarkable. Drawing inspiration from the YA novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis and penned by Suspiria and A Bigger Splash writer David Kajganich, the eighties-set story of a young cannibal cut loose by her father and roaming the American underbelly morphs from a story of a teen girl named Maren (Taylor Russell of Waves) finding her place among other ‘eaters’ on the road to a romance between her and another cannibal, played by Timothee Chalamet. The script is less interested in the road-movie shenanigans of the story than in the rules and lore that guides these characters through the world – the way in which they can sense each other through smell, the existential and practical implications of the way in which they are forced to live. 

The film begins well, with Maren’s world imploding after a teen slumber party turns violent. This early scene finds a kind of eroticism in Maren’s desire to eat human flesh – she sniffs the neck of her first, unknowing victim with a longing that reads as sexual before the eventual reveal. When that reveal comes, it is visceral and shocking and, yes, quite funny – as is a later scene of Maren, under the wing of Mark Rylance’s older drifter cannibal Sully, as she is guided to a recently deceased woman and instructed to feed. Guadagnino is coy about the metaphorical implications of the cannibalism of Bones and All, wisely ducking the impulse to make every element of horror represent trauma or some other socially buzzed-about topic. Indeed, at times it seems that Guadagnino is simply taking a bloody delight in the viscerality and outright grossness of cannibalism. The desire to consume is largely left up to interpretation, but seems to flow from characters who are desperately hungry to love but don’t know how to express it, except to try and swallow the objects of their affections, quite literally. 

It’s a loose, shaggy thing, frequently endearing and always beautifully lensed by cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan. The capturing of the American landscape evokes Badlands and the films of Wim Wenders, most certainly, but it is telling that Guadagnino doesn’t seem to have much interest or love for these locations or the people that populate them. The affection for their idiosyncrasies is what made so much of those earlier works so indelible. Indeed, Bones and All clings closely to the three characters that swirl about each other over the course of the film – Maren, Sully and Chalamet’s Lee, a handsome young cannibal trying to maintain a sense of humanity and decency despite his urges. 

This is where the script does the film a disservice, though perhaps Guadagnino is not entirely bereft of blame either, as the star-cross’d romance the film promises never really sparks off in a meaningful way. Chalamet’s performance never really finds a centre, and as such the chemistry between he and Russell lacks the woozy excitement that Guadagnino captured so well in Call Me By Your Name. The story seems interested in almost everything but the relationship, which too often is posed as something symbolic of …something, rather than feeling true and organic. The matter-of-factness of the relationship is not helped by the frequent interference of Rylance’s scenery-chewing Sully, who is a fearsome figure but rendered hopelessly cartoonish by Rylance’s assemblage of tics and traits, never really sewing together into something convincing. It’s rare to get an American movie of this kind of ambition and vision – and that should be celebrated. Bones and All is a beguiling, immaculately-presented feast, but you might be forgiven for hitting a McDonalds on the way home.

Bones and All is in cinemas now.

WATCH THE TRAILER HERE