BONES AND ALL is a delicate and moving love story and a terrifying horror film. Some might think that you can’t have both but, with Luca Guadagnino at the helm, you can.
Here’s the synopsis: BONES AND ALL is a story of first love between Maren, a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee, an intense and disenfranchised drifter; a liberating road odyssey of two young people coming into their own, searching for identity and chasing beauty in a perilous world that cannot abide who they are.
I think it is essential to state that much too often it seems that it is more important to categorize art than to enjoy it. Art is a communication from the mind and heart of an artist. They take the chance that their message could be misunderstood to give to us. In hope of saying what means most to them in the language of their souls.
Much like his retooling of Suspiria, Luca Guadagnino has striven to tell a story important to him in his way. Is BONES AND ALL a horror film? Unequivocally, it is. But it is a horror film that is so quintessentially Guadagnino’s work that it defies and subverts many of the forms of horror films that have come before it. When I spoke with Guadagnino, he said that his inspiration for this film was Nicolas Ray’s They Live By Night and the work of the photographer William Eggleston.
The book that the film is based on, Bones and All by Camille DeAngelis, is, from all reports, a beautifully written examination of the moral issues related to cannibalism: “feminism, loneliness, and self-loathing.” In this film, Guadagnino and his actors and crew have taken a much different angle on the topic of cannibalism. The characters in the film as portrayed by Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, André Holland, and Chloë Sevigny are real people. Confused, scared, odd, and in search of some kind of comfort or companionship in their lives. Cannibalism is just a fact. These people are afflicted by the need for no apparent reason but accept it to varying degrees.
The quandary of the cannibals brought to my mind the original film The Wolfman with Lon Chaney. He never asked to be what people considered a monster and he had no control over his fate to turn into a werewolf when the moon is full. The characters of Maren and Lee have this same problem. They never asked to have the compulsion to feed on other humans and there’s a guilt within them that ostracizes them from other human beings, like their families, and binds them together. They understand each other’s plight and the pain that they carry.
There is also a component of secret joy within the act of eating flesh. It’s what they need and that’s where the guilt comes from for the main characters. They meet other cannibals on their travels and not all of them have the same moral standard.
In particular, Maren thinks of herself as a normal, if poor, young woman, who has a very normal life ahead of her. Then everything changes. One of the most frightening things in the film is how quickly her life changes forever with a simple act that she had no control over. When she meets every new person, she has to view them with her newly opened eyes. Everyone is a potential threat which is something that I think every woman can relate to on a real level. Being able to trust under these circumstances is not easy.
Taylor Russell’s performance is stellar in that she portrays Maren, not as a monster, but as a real person with a problem that she has to find a way to live with, that she can never really solve, and that puts herself and everyone around her in danger. Her performance beats with a gentle but insistent wish that she could trust anyone completely, but the creeping fear that she cannot even trust herself.
Timothée Chalamet has an engaging charm but, in the role of Lee, he has a wary distance from everything and nearly everyone. Chalamet takes a step away from the work that you are familiar with and that he has done in the past. His abundant charm is still there but sublimated with internal desperation hidden under a casual demeanor. It’s multilayered and the pain of being an outsider is just under the surface and it brings out the natural strangeness within him as a person. His instant, if slightly reluctant bonding, with Maren, is totally believable. It’s a moment that I have experienced in life when someone you meet is just a person that you are going to be with. Their chemistry is linked to fate.
Mark Rylance is also strange but in a different way. I don’t want to do spoilers but he is absolutely terrifying in a way that I was not expecting from Mark Rylance. It’s that strangeness and odd gentleness that is most frightening about him from the first moment Maren sets eyes on him. It’s a blockbuster performance.
Chloë Sevigny and André Holland do really good work as well and there’s a surprising and brief performance from director David Gordon Green. The performances are all wonderful and believable. You love each character a little which speaks well of the actors, the director, and the casting by Francine Maisler. You believe they could live in the Midwest and exist in this world.
There’s a sensuality to the film with its bewitching visuals in nature and the plain, utilitarian interiors, and to the character’s cannibalism. There’s blood and gore on display and it has that sensual nature. The first act of cannibalism has the aura of desire and sets off the sensuality in the film. The eating of flesh is, after all, sensual, so instead of portraying it as zombie film-style flesh-ripping violence, it is an act of intimacy. It makes sense and differentiates the film further from the normal horror movie conventions.
The cinematography by Arseni Khachaturian is splendid. Your eyes and parched inner being can drink in that beauty in the wide open spaces and the tiny cluttered homes. Yellow seems to predominate the interior spaces and the outdoor scenes, especially at night have a rich depth, a sensual feeling, that is in harmony with the overall tone of the film. There is joy in the cinematography and the wildness of freedom. It seems to echo the phrase from Fight Club, “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything”
The music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross works very well for the film. There are curated songs from the time period, but mostly the soundtrack is based on acoustic guitar until the final confrontation where Reznor and Ross return to a sound that is much more electronic, like the music of Nine Inch Nails, but a very intense and harrowing sound that seems to envelop the frame.
These characters haven’t lost their humanity. They have lost their ties to the regular everyday world. They aren’t going to be able to work in an office and must now exist on the margins of society. Regular people present a danger and a temptation to them as do their fellow cannibals. It would be easier and more pat to assume they lost their humanity, but the film doesn’t make that mistake. Some of the cannibals are trying to find a way to exist with their condition, some have fully accepted it and enjoyed it, and some have violently refused it.
BONES AND ALL presents the status as the other in the fantasy construct in a way that many of us can relate to. Whatever it is about yourself, that thing that you can’t change, the things that make you who you are that others cannot accept, BONES AND ALL offers understanding and solace. It understands the things that make you feel like a monster, that make you feel unloveable and, yes, cursed, and gives that feeling expression. It shows you that even if society cannot accept who you are, you can make your own place in the world. It shows you that no one can deny your right to exist. It shows that you can fight for who you are and that you should. Your life is important and you have the right to it.
BONES AND ALL is pure cinema magic without judgment. A bloody paean to the outsider and the other. A sensual love story filled with all of the carnal desires you could imagine and more. Superb and filled with humanity, BONES AND ALL is freedom from the traps society sets for so many of us and packed with the artistic wildness of the soul.
BONES AND ALL will be in theaters nationwide on November 23, 2022.
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