![]() Maren has a lot to navigate - a family mystery, her first love, her first understanding that there are other Eaters and rules that bind them. There’s a century-old tradition of sexualizing monsters and predatory behavior, and Bones and All leans into it hard, while still building the story around the old coming-of-age patterns of protagonists finding themselves (and finding their courage in the process). And their crimes aren’t sexy and stylish, like Bonnie and Clyde’s bank robberies or the vampiric murders in The Hunger - Guadagnino makes the consumption rituals bloody, grotesque, and animalistic, an unpleasant matter of survival.Īll of which gives him more room to play when it comes to romanticizing Lee and Maren’s connection. Bones and All more or less follows in the footsteps of movies from Bonnie and Clyde to Terrence Malick’s Badlands in putting a pair of pretty people on the wrong side of the law and sending them on the run, but in this case, it’s questionable how human they are. Their victims don’t have to be alive, but once they’ve started consuming human bodies, they have to continue, or die. The early trailer and festival summaries for Bones and All were coy about what makes Maren, Lee, and others different, but public descriptions of the film have widely shared the secret: Bones and All’s wide-eyed central couple are both “Eaters,” effectively ghouls driven to devour human flesh. Viewers who don’t already know the fundamental premise of the film, and want to experience it in the theater, should stop reading right here. He and Guadagnino make plenty of room for Maren learning through conversations, first with new acquaintance Sully ( Bridge of Spies’ Mark Rylance, once again disappearing into an incredible performance), then with newer acquaintance Lee (Chalamet), a world-wise boy about her age. Screenwriter David Kajganich (a writer-producer-developer on the much-beloved horror series The Terror) never feels like he’s in a hurry to get to any particular part of the story. Each new revelation about Maren’s past and present is unfolded carefully, in part because she doesn’t really understand her own nature, and has to learn about it alongside the audience. And when the reveals do come, they’re horrifying and exhilarating at the same time, in part because the details are so unexpected.īeyond going in prepared for tremendous amounts of blood and some brief, intense violence, Bones and All is the kind of film that’s better experienced in the moment than in descriptions. A furtive sense of shame hangs over all the little details of their home and their interactions, but it takes a while for the film to reveal why that’s true, and what they’re both navigating. Maren lives alone with her father (André Holland) in a dilapidated, disintegrating home. Initially, the film centers on Maren ( Waves’ Taylor Russell), a high schooler with a series of secrets. But it takes a while for Chalamet to enter the picture. Photo: Yannis Drakoulidis/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Picturesīones and All reunites Guadagnino and Call Me by Your Name star Timothée Chalamet for a second love story. But for genre-agnostic cinephiles, the sheer daring and uniqueness of the story - an adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 YA novel of the same name - will be a major part of the draw. Romantic-drama fans are certainly going to see more bloody eviscerations than they’re used to getting in their movies. ![]() Horror hounds may be disappointed by how much of the film is low-key relationship drama and coming-of-age story, low on breathless tension-building and jump scares. While Bones and All bridges those two movies so neatly that it feels calculated, it also raises the question of how much audience crossover there might be between the two films. It’s a strange movie, seemingly designed to confuse both fans of Guadagnino’s previous horror-inflected feature, 2018’s messy giallo remake Suspiria, and fans of his 2017 sun-baked gay romance Call Me by Your Name. ![]() But the metaphor has rarely been as startlingly vivid as it is in Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, a gory shocker that comes with plenty of familiar horror-movie elements, but plays far more like a classic road romance. And for adults looking back on that era of their lives, the sense of loss and nostalgia can feel similar to the emotions around navigating death. It’s such a natural narrative pairing: First loves rarely last, and youth definitely doesn’t.įor most people, that burning intensity of young love - the “Everything is new and wonderful, and we’re the first people to ever experience sex” feeling of infatuation and discovery - is likely to fade quickly. The urge to equate young love with doom and mortality probably goes back way beyond Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet. It has been updated and republished for the movie’s digital release. This review was originally published in conjunction with Bones and All’s theatrical release. ![]()
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