Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Starring: Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg, André
Holland, Chloë Sevigny, David Gordon Green, Jessica Harper
Following his remake/reimagining of Dario Argento's
Suspiria, Luca Guadagnino gives us further evidence of a childhood spent
watching the gory horror movies churned out by his country in the 1970s.
Like many Italian filmmakers before him, Guadagnino has made a cannibal
movie, but where his predecessors set their grisly tales in the jungles
of South America, Guadagnino's Bones and All plays out in
the more banal surrounds of middle America.
Bones and All is adapted from a 2015 novel by
Camille DeAngelis, but its late 1980s setting gives it the look
and texture of some lost Eric Red-scripted horror movie from the period.
In his scripts for cult classics The Hitcher and
Near Dark, Red presented a netherworld that existed on the highways and byways
of America. His films were populated by monsters in human form, humans
who behaved like monsters, and monsters who wished they could be human.
All three archetypes are present in Bones and All.
The monster who just wishes she could be a normal teenage girl is
18-year-old Maren (Taylor Russell). She's always the new girl at
school because her father, Frank (Andre Holland), keeps moving
from town to town before Maren gets too familiar with the locals. Maren
is a cannibal you see, and though she hasn't acted on her impulses since
childhood, Frank knows it's only a matter of time before she tries to
chew someone's face off. That time comes when Maren sneaks out of her
locked bedroom to join a sleepover with classmates. Overtaken by hunger
pangs, Maren strips the flesh from a girl's fingers as though she were
peeling the plastic coating off speaker wire.
Frank and Maren flee to a new town, but Maren wakes to find her father
has disappeared, leaving some cash, a birth certificate with details of
her mother and a cassette detailing Maren's grisly backstory and why he
can no longer accept the responsibility of taking care of her. Setting
off to find her mother, Maren discovers that there are other "eaters,"
and falls in with Lee (Timothee Chalamet), a young cannibal
drifter who tries his best to only eat those he feels deserve such a
fate.
Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich fashion a sense that
Maren and Lee aren't really under any threat posed by regular society
(something greatly helped by setting the film in the pre-surveillance
era of the '80s), but rather from their own instincts and those who
share their curse. Like several vampires movies, this cannibal tale is
an addiction allegory, but despite its photogenic young leads it never
glamourises their plight. A vampire sinking their fangs into an exposed
jugular is one of the most eroticised images in horror, but there's
nothing sexy about a cannibal tearing flesh from bone like a rabid dog.
Maren and Lee are as far from Twilight's Bella and Edward as you could find. They're a pathetic, tortured
pair, but in each other's company two negatives make a positive as they
try their best to control their urges. When Maren asks Lee who his first
victim was and he replies "A babysitter," she beams. "Mine too!" She's
found someone she never imagined she could have, someone who shares her
secret, and the two bond like new classmates discovering they share a
favourite band.
While several vampire movies have effectively created a metaphor for
the addict, Bones and All goes further by creating a
tangible world around them, filled with the obstacles and uncertainties
that hound those so afflicted. Like any other addicts, Maren finds
herself forced to spend time in the company of fellow addicts, knowing
that any friendly visage they might present could be dropped at any
moment once the insatiable pangs arrive. Mark Rylance is as hammy
as ever yet still manages to be intensely creepy as Sully, an aging
cannibal who refers to himself in the third person like some egotistical
footballer. Sully offers to show Maren the cannibal ropes, and does make
her aware of her ability to sniff out fellow "eaters", but it seems he
may want more than just companionship from the teen. Decked out like a
Native American minstrel, Sully scalps his victims, keeping braids of
their hair as gruesome totems in a long rope. It's one of the most
disturbingly original props you'll have seen in a horror movie in some
time, and it plays a part in a tragic denouement. Elsewhere
Michael Stuhlbarg shows up as a hillbilly cannibal who claims not
just to eat flesh but to devour his victims in the manner of the film's
title. He's accompanied by a "groupie," a non-eater who nevertheless
eats human flesh for the hell of it. This creep is played by filmmaker
David Gordon Green. The lack of any scares in his three awful
Halloween
films might be explained by his holding back all of his creepiness for
this cameo – rarely have you seen such a sinister smile.
Arseni Khachaturan's naturalistic cinematography and
Guadagnino's refusal to indulge in showy visuals greatly add to the
gritty texture of Bones and All. This is an America as bland as the one presented so chillingly by
John McNaughton in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a land so vast and open that a killer's only way to get caught is to
make a mistake or stop for a break. There's a tragic inevitability about
Maren and Lee's fate, that despite their best efforts the burden they
carry will finally prove too much. But for long stretches of
Bones and All we believe these kids might beat the odds,
and crucially, we hope they can. Unlike so many exploitative hacks,
Guadagnino understands that we don't watch horror movies to witness
death so much as to feel alive.
