Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Distributed by: United Artists Releasing
Written by Alexander Reams
87/100
Luca Guadagnino’s predilections have previously been quite predictable. With 2017’s “Call Me By Your Name” he broke through in America and subsequently was able to indulge his more devious desires, as evident in 2018’s “Suspiria” (a masterpiece of expressionist horror). With “Bones and All” we see his second collaboration with Timothée Chalamet, a much different film from their first. Adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis, “Bones and All” is a fusion of genres if I’ve ever seen one, mixing horror, romance, road movie, stalker, and family drama all in one massive array of blood and love that our two leads paint throughout the film. Maren (Taylor Russell) is a young woman on the run due to hereditary cannibalistic urges that plague her family. After one mistake too many Maren’s father abandons her and she’s forced to run, leading her to meet her first fellow “eater” Sully (Mark Rylance).
Meeting Sully operates as a sort of secondary inciting incident for the film and directly leads Maren down the road that the rest of the film follows. She feels scared and unsafe at the hands of Sully, despite his claims that he “never eats another eater” and his overall disheveled and menacing look of trophies from his previous victims. Eventually, she meets Lee (Chalamet), and romance is layered into his horror-road movie. The bulk of the film is spent on the road meeting strangers, Michael Stuhlbarg and David Gordon Green make appearances as a pair of hillbilly cannibals, Jessica Harper (of 1977’s “Suspiria” fame) makes one as Maren’s grandmother, and André Holland and Chloë Sevigny as Maren’s father and mother. Guadagnino has a superb cast, he shoots the film in a very naturalist way, and the score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is among the year’s finest, with (You Made It Feel Like) Home leaving the credits with a haunting impression. “Bones and All” is one of Guadagnino’s finest and most disturbing films.
“Bones and All” Trailer
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