I don’t know that there is a more taboo movie this year than Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, the love story of two young cannibals on the road together. It is a mad fusion of genres without irony or cynicism; grisly and discomforting in one scene, intimate and sentimental in another. The fact of the former might easily repulse the appetite for the latter. These are two people brought together by their shared predilection for eating human flesh, organs, cartilage, though stopping short of the “bones and all” boasted of by another. How is one supposed to sincerely invest in their experiences, empathize with their humanity?
It reminds me of another movie that combines a tender story of human connection with the subject matter of shocking perversity –Titane, which of course was the sophomore feature of a director who began her career with the cannibal film Raw. Bones and All hasn’t the pulsating exuberance or unashamed fearlessness of Titane, Guadagnino employs a distinctly low-key approach, but it is just as confident in the validity of its’ premise and themes. A movie that honestly believes in the virtues of its’ romance, regardless of the extreme context around it. It is audacious, whether or not you find it at all tasteful –to pardon the pun.
The movie pulls the rug out viciously early on, setting the context of a new girl in a new town in the 1980s struggling to fit in at school. She starts getting along with a few classmates and is invited to a sleepover, where in a moment of physical intimacy she bites a girl’s finger very nearly off -one of the most viscerally grotesque moments I’ve seen in a while, sudden and graphic and underscored morbidly by “Save a Prayer”. She runs home and her father played by André Holland, knows exactly what happened… and begins packing their things.
This is Maren, played by a breakout Taylor Russell, a girl who has fought to suppress cannibalistic urges from a young age, since she killed and partly ate a babysitter. We learn about this and the absence of her mother, also a cannibal, who left when she was a baby, via a tape recording made by her father, who likewise abandons her on her eighteenth birthday. She listens to it repeatedly on her walkman as she travels from Maryland to Ohio, and subsequently on her odyssey through middle America in search of some sense of belonging.
The key thing is that Maren is no homicidal psychopath, she doesn’t kill people to feast on –rather her cannibalism is instinctual, and she has a sense of moral clarity about it. It’s something akin to an addiction that she is ashamed of, a proclivity she was born with, that she doesn’t understand and is something she attempts to consciously repress. That is a difficult thing to do, especially as she meets other ‘eaters’ who can sense one another in an ambiguous almost comic book superpower kind of way –and who might normalize the practice for her, another prospect she is very afraid of.
The first of these is Sully, played by Mark Rylance, an extremely creepy weird old man, who invites her to stay with him temporarily in the home of a dying old woman without family to care for her. Though he apparently has Maren’s same misgivings about murder, Sully essentially operates as a vulture, lurking around in anticipation of death. He tells Maren at one point that the older she gets the more her compulsion will become a dependency. Another pair who show up later played by a terrifyingly eccentric Michael Stuhlbarg and David Gordon Green, and who seem to embody the stereotype Texas Chainsaw Massacre breed of cannibal, encourage her to go further -and she is disgusted to find that Green’s character Brad is a cannibal by choice, by virtue of his relationship with Stuhlbarg’s Jake. But then there’s Lee.
Timothée Chalamet, in playing this withdrawn melancholy eater, is in some way reprising his energy from his last work for Guadagnino, Call Me By Your Name. Although rather than the awkward undertones of budding sexual discovery, he plays it with a conscious contradiction of brooding matinee idol charm and grotesque eccentricity. There’s a twisted joke to the very nature of the character. And yet he compliments Maren greatly, a considerate companion who in a more subdued way is likewise ethically troubled by what he is. They travel together in search of Maren’s mother, and along the way that love comes naturally -in an extreme literal way they have no one else who truly understands their passions and their pains. And very weirdly it becomes a rich and emotionally resonant relationship -for stretches the movies’ matter of cannibalism becomes incidental, and this is either refreshing or disturbing in and of itself.
But the romantic instincts Guadagnino brings to the fore in this movie are potent. Russell and Chalamet have excellent chemistry but it’s in the building of individual moments that really drive this emotional core. Chief among them is the scene where Lee reveals his traumatic backstory to Maren, which is itself a fascinating irony. Because the story he tells of overcoming his fathers’ abuse is harsh and graphic, and even seems to vindicate his cannibalism, defining it in a context of triumph -very unsettling things; yet the performative and visual language, the vulnerability and tenderness displayed by both actors makes it a beautiful scene, in a warped way one of the most touching of the year.
Where the movie also succeeds as a powerful human examination is in Maren’s quest for her mother, and with her, answers to the psychological conundrum behind her condition. She desperately wants to find a way for her cannibalism to make sense, to understand it as a vital aspect of understanding herself. What she ultimately finds with her mother, played by Chloë Sevigny, is disarming though, and only further alienating -amounting to an indictment on both her cannibalism and her personhood itself. But in that lies the motivation to dispense with her baggage, carefully threaded out through the remainder of her character arc. A gradual liberation materializes, and a new power over instinct for both characters, as their westward trek is tinged with new optimism and intrepid purpose. In those moments where Guadagnino can’t help but let a little Badlands or Thelma and Louise slip in, the movie undertakes a rush of new energy. Accepting what they are and the distinct emotional meanings their ‘eating’ had for them, while not being defined by it like Sully, it’s their big victory and you can’t help share in that feeling.
It’s important to say though the movie doesn’t end on this note. Although it does take one more step at re-contextualizing the cannibalism a last time. Guadagnino doesn’t forget the severity of this subject matter and pays off its’ lingering tensions with gruesome aplomb. He finally ties cannibalism vitally to the romance in a suitably intense, binding way -freaky, though earnest and unmistakably correct. Bones and All is a movie of extremes, going out on a prospect as consciously disconcerting as it opened on. But there are extremes of other kinds at work -of mental anguish, of desperation for belonging, of estrangement and self-loathing, and of love. It just so happens these come in the context of people with a nigh insatiable appetite for feeding on human bodies. There’s something deeply horrifying to how the movie reconciles that -and something just as endearing.
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