Mark Reviews Movies: BONES AND ALL

Bones and All, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 17, 2022

"Monsters don't deserve love," a character reads late in Bones and All, a genuinely haunting and deeply affecting film that just happens to be about cannibals. This is a horror film to some degree, of course, because its story is punctuated by moments of violence, setpieces of gore, and the grisly sights of teeth tearing through human flesh. To pigeonhole director Luca Guadagnino's film to a single genre and by way of those descriptions, though, is to do a disservice to the rich material and, especially, how skillfully the filmmaker tells this story.

It is—again, to some degree—about love, but even that broad description seems to restrict and sentimentalize the extent of what's happening here. The story comes from a novel by Camille DeAngelis, and Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich allow the narrative to maintain the relaxed pace and focus on character that we would expect from an introspective piece of literature.

This doesn't mean, though, that the film meanders. There's a clear sense of momentum, propelled by a plot that basically amounts to that old formula of a road trip. Even so, the filmmaking lingers exactly when, where, and on whom it needs to, in order to give us a firm understanding of who these characters are, what they want and need, and how these internal desires and conflicts speak to thoughts, feelings, and drives within all of us.

The story begins simply and innocently, with Maren (Taylor Russell) being invited to a sleepover by a classmate at her high school. She asks her father (played by André Holland) if she can go. He denies her request.

Nothing seems odd about any of this, until Maren sneaks a screwdriver into her bedroom, before dad says goodnight and locks his daughter's door from the outside. Even stranger, the windows to the young woman's bedroom are screwed shut. As her father sleeps—seemingly ready to spring into action at a moment's notice—on the couch, Maren unscrews the fastening of her domestic prison. She sneaks out into the night, finds her way to the classmate's home, and shows exactly why her living situation and her father's manner are as they are.

The girls talk about ordinary teenage concerns, dressed in the clothes of the story's late-1980s period and painting their nails. The classmate who invited Maren asks her to take a look at this particular color of polish, and staring at the girl's finger in her hand, Maren moves it toward her. She puts the digit in her mouth and bites, ripping the skin straight off it.

It's genuinely horrifying, made all the more so because just about everything surrounding the moment is so mundane and harmless, and the rest of the film, from isolated sequences to the whole of it, is an exemplary balancing act of mood and intention. Things seem ordinary in one moment, and something will shift to bring about a sense of dread, terror, horror, or, on the other end of the spectrum, empathy for characters who, if judged solely on the specific type of hunger, might seem incapable of such a connection.

One of the smartest moves here is how there is no explanation for Maren's condition. She is either some kind of supernatural figure, akin to a flesh-eating vampire, or a genetic mutation.

She and others like her—which there are, as she soon discovers after her father, exhausted from hiding and running and protecting Maren, abandons his daughter and leaves the young woman to fend for herself—simply exist. They're compelled to eat human flesh for whatever reason. In not giving us some kind of explanation, Kajganich's screenplay evades turning these characters into some kind of "other," passing judgment on them for their nature, and seeing them as anything else than lonely, wounded people, just trying to make their way through a life and a world made more frightening and confusing because of this condition.

That's the crux of Maren's story, which follows her on a trip from Virginia and across the Midwest (Arseni Khachaturan's stark but beautiful cinematography in capturing these small towns and landscapes mirrors the darkness of the characters' solitude and some hope for feeling a part of something). She's heading to Michigan, looking to find the mother who, when Maren was a child, also left her. Along the way, the young woman encounters and spends time with others like her. Some seem friendly, only to reveal themselves as far less than that, and one clearly is capable of doing harm, although he becomes closer to her than anyone else in Maren's life.

All of them, though, are as isolated and melancholy as Maren. Each of them has handled that state of being for different spans of time and with differing levels of sanity.

In the first category of new acquaintances, we have Sully (Mark Rylance), who is waiting for Maren just beyond the bus station in some small town on her first stop on the way to Michigan. He could smell her from blocks away, at a house to which he invites Maren. That scene, as with the sleepover, gradually reveals some horror waiting to unfold, and even though Sully is absent from the story for a long stretch, the impact of Rylance's performance means that this character stays in the back of our mind—a threat amplified by his pathetic desperation for some kind of connection.

The most significant bond, though, is between Maren and Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a young, cannibalistic drifter who kills and eats a stranger for being rude in a grocery store. Maren catches him after the act, and since she could use a ride and he could stand some company, the two drive a stolen truck, first to Lee's hometown in Kentucky, from where he had been unofficially exiled, and then to find Maren's mother.

That's the basic structure and movement of the plot, which has the two meeting more like them—as well one pretending to be, for reasons Maren finds unthinkable—and looking for another meal—putting a moral divide between the pair—and connecting over the simple but intimately profound fact that each can understand the other. The performances from the two leads speak volumes about that bond in quiet moments, with Russell playing her guilt and uncertainty like an open wound of the soul, while Chalamet puts on an act of outward confidence that hides his physical and emotional vulnerability.

Some, obviously, will be tempted to find some deeper allegory or specific metaphor in the central conceit of Bones and All. Most will find it, too, because the film cuts to the core of something inescapably human. We are all lonely to some degree or another, and none of us wants to be. That's the plain and painful truth in the marrow of this disturbing but poignant film.

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