Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino, 2022)

[DarkImbecile]

Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s latest score will be for Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal romance Bones and All

[ianthemovie]

Wait, Luca Guadagnino is doing a cannibal-sex movie with most of the cast from Call Me By Your Name but not Armie Hammer? Seems like a missed opportunity!

[therewillbeblus]

Wait, Luca Guadagnino is doing a cannibal-sex movie with most of the cast from Call Me By Your Name but not Armie Hammer? Seems like a missed opportunity!

[swo17]

Keep my wife out of your mouth!

[DarkImbecile]

For as much as I loved the much-anticipated Women Talking and TÁR, far and away the most surprising experience I had at Telluride this year was with Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All, a gory cannibal romance that pulls an amazing magic trick — not merely in making you less concerned about the whole murdering-people-and-consuming-their-flesh thing than about these beautiful young people and their love for each other, but in making its characters' horrifying compulsions empathetic.

It's frankly mind-boggling that Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich (and, I'm assuming, the source novel by Camille DeAngelis) managed to come together to make a film this good by putting American Honey, Near Dark, and Raw into a meat grinder and treating the bloody sausage that comes out like a gourmet meal. A big part of that success is in the casting of the lead roles: Taylor Russell is a bonafide star who fulfills the promise she showed as a supporting performer in the underseen and under-appreciated Waves by seizing the lead role of Maren and delivering in career-making fashion, while Timothée Chalamet as the lanky heartthrob Lee leans into the charisma he too often holds at arm's length in films like Dune. Unable to control her dangerous urges and finding herself alone and traveling across 1988 America to seek out long-lost family, Maren stumbles into a relationship with Lee, another rootless drifter who takes her under his wing even as she realizes that the community of "eaters" is larger and more varied than she imagined.

Bones and All manages to thrive as a bizarre genre hybrid: as sweepingly emotional a love story as any I've seen in recent years, this is also very much a not-fucking-around horror epic, with Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Chloë Sevigny each managing to be terrifying to different degrees and in their own distinct way. I walked in thinking the cannibal element would be revealed at the end of a slow build and probably worked around tastefully to avoid alienating viewers, but instead (and to his credit) Guadagnino makes clear before the title card how hard he intends to lean into the premise, and he never lets up. In addition to the yearning and bloodspurting, the film is also consistently funny, both in a laugh-out-loud sense and in dryly ironic juxtapositions and character moments.

Fourteen films into a festival that's never been particularly open to genre works, it's hard to emphasize how much fun I had getting to wallow in some shock and blood, and as much as I'm often an outlier in my tolerance of films like this, the groans and gasps from the packed house I saw it with never curdled into angry disgust or exasperation, and I didn't notice any walkouts from my part of the theater; the number of people I spoke to expressing surprise at how much they enjoyed it hints at the possibility that this film might have a chance to be one of the more extreme-left-field successes since Silence of the Lambs.

[therewillbeblus]

I’ve been looking forward to this way more since hearing much of the early praise single out Taylor Russell‘s performance as the best part about the movie. Maybe she’ll finally get recognized for it, after the curious bungle of Waves (still not sure how that film, and specifically her part, elided public consciousness- what a botched opportunity for a campaign)

[therewillbeblus]

Bones and All, a gory cannibal romance that pulls an amazing magic trick — not merely in making you less concerned about the whole murdering-people-and-consuming-their-flesh thing than about these beautiful young people and their love for each other, but in making its characters' horrifying compulsions empathetic.

Great thoughts, DI. I wasn't entirely on board with this until maybe an hour in, when the tone percolated and the ideas began to come together for me. I walked away absolutely loving it, and I suspect the film will only grow richer as it lingers in my mind.

Similar to Call Me By Your Name, which I found less effective as a convincing love story and more as exposition of an individual's first romance and heartbreak, this film grabbed me by its (thankfully-unspecific but palpable) allegorical themes. The love story worked for demonstrating the importance of interpersonal connection to momentarily evade the loneliness of living with actively traumatizing conditions independently. However, its potency still succeeded through layered portrayals of individualized experience, and how those we take a chance on to emotionally connect with ultimately aid our respective self-actualizations. There's a sensory component to the social aspect here- whether smelling someone with biological similarities, or feeling energy that instinctually gravitates us toward those we can trust or repels us from those we can't. It's a welcome detail that elevates the film's interests from simply corporeal terrain into the spiritual as well, but also lends credence to the humanistic shade of the picture by making these principals ultrasensitive empaths at heart, who due to circumstance must conceal aspects of this quality from themselves and others. After all, a leading hypothesis in addiction studies supposes that addicts have a natural sensitivity to feeling, heightening dysphoria to unbearable degrees.

So for me this film functioned primarily as a non-didactic exhibition of the 'disease model' of addiction, holding empathy with fearless attention for the addicted without turning away from the consequential casualties from their actions. At times this felt like an apocalyptic world of addiction, without any discernible path or opportunity to live with disease in a manageable way. The cannibals are forced to exist in the lower fringes of society, where the realism to the setting disallows a reading of remote dystopia, except for as a projected manifestation of the actively addicted, unable to access or set sights on a bright future. I too was often reminded of American Honey's milieus, with a heavier meditation on alienation and without making as much room for liberation, which would be inorganic to its ethos.

The backdrop is appropriately the tail-end societal erosion of Reagan's America, that neglected populations identifying with mental illness, addiction, LGBTQ, et al., and that's where any faux-concrete metaphor to only addiction is respectfully undone and broadened in scope. This film is exploring the relationship between marginalized groups, their status, and mental health; how the isolation of living with inherent conditions, trauma histories, socioeconomic factors, homelessness, etc. are all intertwined to fatalistically reinforce the immobility of people in lower classes and with unsupported ailments.

Rylance in particular is a fascinating character, who most clearly represents one living with co-occurring disorders (as 90+% of addicts do). Early on, it's apparent that he's been developmentally stunted of social skills through trauma and obstructions to education. All of the cannibal characters struggle to retain early memories, and all have had their education impacted. Bones and All peripherally engages with systemic barriers, how trauma affects the brain and our developing personalities, and how a lonely existence can continue to breed maladaptive behaviors and desensitization when extended beyond youth of the central couple. Rylance was dealt a rotten hand, and this is continually acknowledged until it ceases to matter in friction with tangible threat.

There is a criteria separating the protagonists from antagonists in this tale. The former contemplate issues of morality in nature vs action, confront their rationalizations and other defense mechanisms to some extent, and Guadagnino conveys it all without judgment. I think the title represents the antagonists' stagnantly-implemented and complacency-bred coping skill of repression, going full-tilt into diffusing any emotional or moral self-reflection and completely embracing the lifestyle myopically, which the central characters refuse to do. Their approach might be more painful, but the reminders are key to an existence with hope and growth; some chance at mobility even if externally immeasurable and internally -and eternally- alone. This is a messy movie, literally and intentionally so. At first I wasn’t convinced on a late act set piece that devolved one character down to a purer form of immorality, but the inescapable nature of their condition necessarily and admirably obfuscates the fantasy, and this device was critical to make that revelation sting.

All the actors are incredible, and I can't think of an ensemble this consistently dynamic from this past year, even if their talents shine in predominately (and suitably) isolated chunks. I've always loved Jessica Harper, but I've never seen her show off the kind of raw pathos she does here in her brief scene. Taylor Russell continues to prove that she needs to be in anything and everything marginally youth-centered, since she's guaranteed to bring authentic dimensionality to characters far beyond what's written on the page. Rylance has never given such an uncomfortably committed performance, which does add a lot of weird humor into the mix. My only issue was Sevigny's part

SpoilerShow

where a 15-year-old letter spelled out her desired intervention to kill her own daughter if/when she showed up, and then was not only remembered but followed through on as soon as Russell finished reading that final part of the note, for the purpose of some kind of forced cathartic horror bit... Like, what? This kind of deus ex machina doesn't belong in a movie that's otherwise so genuine.

I'm not exactly the biggest Guadagnino fan, but I think this may be his most audacious and best work yet.

[cantinflas]

David Kajganich: 5 Films That Influenced 'Bones and All'