The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B-
Bones and All comes to us from director Luca Guadagnino, who I know from his godawful remake of Suspiria in 2018 (I know that film has a lot of fans, but I must respectfully say that you’re all out of your fucking minds). Between those two films, I now have a profile forming for Guadagnino, as he likes to take horror elements and bog them down with arthouse bullshit. The good news is that Bones and All is a far, far better film than Suspiria, likely helped by the fact that I don’t have a vastly superior original movie for comparison. In fact, there are moments, and even entire sequences, in Bones and All that are quite good. The bad news is that it never allows itself to flourish and constantly abandons its more interesting elements in favor of a cliche love story with all of the social messages that you’ve come to expect from a modern film.
The film is a love story about cannibals. In this world, some individuals are born with a condition that gives them a hunger for human flesh that must be satiated from time to time. In the opening scene, and the best scene in the film, we are introduced to our teenaged lead Maren as she bites the finger off of another girl at a slumber party and then flees the scene in terror. We learn that this is not the first time that she has had a cannibalistic episode, resulting in her living a nomadic lifestyle with her father as they avoid the consequences of her occasional bouts of flesh eating. Her father has had enough, though, and abandons her. With few resources and little money, she sets out to find her missing mother and meets a number of interesting characters along the way. Unfortunately, she also meets Lee (played by Timothée Chalamet) and they form a romance that grinds down the narrative momentum at every possible moment.
The world of Bones and All is an interesting one. The very concept of cannibalism is presented in a fresh and inventive way, far removed from the jungle-set tropes of Cannibal Holocaust and The Green Inferno, and is almost vampiric in nature. The idea that cannibals are born with such an urge, rather than indulging simply because they have developed a taste for it, is a unique take on the concept. Another interesting addition is the idea that cannibals (or “eaters,” as they call themselves) can recognize each other by scent. This being 2022, I assume that the cannibals are meant to represent gay people or transgender people or whatever. But it’s a concept that works well purely from a narrative perspective, if one isn’t interested in having a film shove a message down your throat for the hundredth time this year.
The film’s biggest strength, though, lies with its secondary characters. In particular, the always-excellent Mark Rylance is absolutely chilling as the villainous Sully. First emerging as a sort-of ghoulish mentor for Maren, showing her the ropes of getting along in life as a cannibal, he becomes increasingly sinister as his interests in the much-younger girl become increasingly murky. Equally fascinating is another cannibal that Maren encounters in her travels that, somewhat humorously, has a non-cannibal sidekick that follows him around like a groupie. All of these characters are portrayed with enough depth that you can imagine the types of hideous adventures that they have been on before crossing into the story of the film. That is a sign of excellent worldbuilding.
Unfortunately, we are left with a fairly uninteresting main plot in this interesting world. Bones and All is often frustrating because it feels like there are far more interesting plots unfolding in this world and we are only given glimpses of them before being forced back into a young-adult romance story. Chalamet’s character becomes a harbinger of narrative doom, as his presence constantly reduces the plot to something that views Twilight as inspirational material. Instead of following the far more interesting Sully, we are left with angsty teenagers reluctantly falling in love and making their way in the world, which is possibly the most dull and lazy path that the film could have possible taken after the strong first act.
Other than Chalamet, whose acting range seems limited to varying levels of solemn, the performances are excellent. I’ve already mentioned Rylance, who deserves a supporting actor nod for his work here, but lead actress Taylor Russell gives a career-making performance here. While I know her from the Escape Room movies, those films didn’t exactly give her much room to show off her acting chops. Here, she carries the film with a performance that runs a gamut from sad to hopeful all while creating a character far more endearing and sympathetic than is warranted by the more pedestrian material. Her chemistry with Chalamet is admirable given his limited range and, while the love story angle never really works, she does her best with it. She also bears an uncanny resemblance to Zendaya at times, causing her pairing with Chalamet to give me constant flashbacks to Dune.
Overall, Bones and All is not the pretentious disaster that I expected it to be. However, there is a much better film somewhere within this material that could have been brought out with more adventurous screenwriting. When it tries to be a horrific drama, it succeeds. When it tries to be a Shakespearian romance and 2022 social messaging, it fails. That’s good enough to put it in the lower end of the B range.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bones_and_All#/media/File:Bones_and_All.jpg
