In vampire movies, from "Nosferatu" to "Twilight" to "Only Lovers Left Alive," bloodsucking is often about more than just bloodsucking: it's about sex, addiction, power, and that's why the main event in a vampire movie doesn't have to be the literal spectacle of seeing fangs tear into human flesh. The elegance of the genre is that it has a built-in metaphorical sweep. “Bones and All,” Luca Guadagnino's YA road movie about a pair of lost souls who turn out to be cannibals (it's an adaptation of the Camille DeAngelis novel), is a movie in which the characters behave like vampires. They blend in with society, but are actually a breed apart, with the ability to smell fresh meat and a consuming desire to "feed".
In this case, though, the feedings aren't elegantly suggestive like in a vampire movie. We see the characters ripping apart bodies and chewing, the meat coming out in pieces, the blood splattering everywhere. By the time they're done eating, it'll look like there was a serial killer in there. If that sounds a bit grotesque, it is; I found the scenes garish and unpleasant. The main reason it's not fun to sit through, though, is that cannibalism, in this film, has no higher meaning, no importance beyond itself. It doesn't mean anything... at all. The characters may, for a few moments, act like flesh-hungry zombies, but they are not zombies. They are meant to be sexy, understanding, and relatable.
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Writers: David Kajganich, Camille DeAngelis
Stars: Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny
It might seem like "Bones and All" is some kind of horror fantasy, and when MGM releases the movie over Thanksgiving weekend, the best chance it will stay at the box office is probably if it sells as a horror movie. terror. Regardless of how it ends up being marketed, however, what audiences will discover is that “Bones and All,” for all its Guignol glitz, is one of the most sketchy, empty, and winding road movies in living memory. The film is two hours and 10 minutes long, and despite the period hook of its 1988 setting, almost nothing of interest happens in it. It spans the entire United States and the images have a travelogue sexiness, but “Bones and All” is a concept in search of a story. The film does not attract us. He stumbles and stumbles and seems to pick himself up as he goes. You may feel eaten alive by boredom.
An expressively brooding actor who was one of the stars of "Waves," Taylor Russell plays 18-year-old Maren, whom we meet while still living with her father in a trailer home, trying to fit in as a newly transplanted tall man. -student. She sneaks out to attend a sleepover, the main event of which is trying on different colors of nail polish. That seems to be going well until Maren grabs the finger of one of her classmates and proceeds to bite it off, leaving the finger barely hanging from her hand.
When she gets home, her father goes into damage control mode, trying to get them away before the police arrive. But he has had enough. Maren soon finds herself abandoned, with a cassette tape from Dad explaining who exactly she is and why she can't stay around anymore trying to protect her from herself.
On her account, Maren meets another cannibal, an eccentric goth named Sully, played by Mark Rylance, who wears a hat with a feather and a long braided ponytail and speaks with a delicate southern accent. Sully tells Maren that he can smell her; that's how he knows she's part of the cannibal tribe. And he wastes no time taking her to a feast, in an upstairs chaos scene that looks like Charles Manson would give it four stars. After decades of reviewing over-the-top horror, I realize I'm suddenly sounding very self-righteous about the gore in "Bones and All," but that's only because I kept wondering: What's the point? The film is not intended to scare us. And since the characters themselves don't experience their cannibalism as gross, the fact that we in the audience do doesn't exactly invite us to identify with them. The problem with these scenes is that we are on the outside looking in.
Maren is lying in a supermarket when she catches the eye of Lee, who turns out to be a chivalrous soul, not to mention the most elegantly dressed cannibal in the history of civilization. Before this week, Maren had never met another cannibal; now she, just like that, she's met two of them. If that sounds a little unlikely, the upshot is that the script for David Kajganich's "Bones and All" doesn't have much logic or consistency.
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