Gruesome yet tender, Bones and All does not need to rely on its shocking premise to charm the audience. Its magnetic stars and beautiful direction craft a story that gently pulls the viewer in and refuses to let go.
★★★★✰
Luca Guadagnino is back with another beautifully directed love story. However, instead of a luxurious villa in the Italian countryside, this film follows two cannibals in the 1980s Midwest. Cannibalism has a long history in film. From the iconic Silence of the Lambs (1991) to the more modern Raw (2016), the consumption of humans is something that has long fascinated audiences. Yet Bones and All achieves something different: it decentres cannibalism. The focus is on our characters, and their desperate need for human connection, whether that be a sweet blossoming romance or a dangerous obsession.
Maren (Taylor Russell) is a shy teenager who struggles with her desire for human flesh. After another gruesome incident, Maren finds herself living on the margins of society. While on a journey to find her estranged mother she meets fellow cannibal Lee (Timothée Chalamet), and the two bond over their shared affliction and their desire to be loved unconditionally. Bones and All is a coming-of-age tale, which combines horror elements with a road movie setting.
The cherished warmth in this movie stems, first and foremost, from its lead. Taylor Russell gives a brilliant performance, bringing tenderness to the screen without ever lacking charisma. In fact, though socially isolated and dangerous, Maren never feels alien. She is a familiar presence. Despite her appetites, she is characterised as intensely human. We see her weep for her lost relationship with her father, long for an understanding mother. This is central to the film: if the audience didn’t believe Maren was capable of love, her entire relationship with Lee and her search for her mother would appear hollow. Instead, we become deeply invested in her emotional journey, particularly when it comes to Lee.
Their ability to love one another is expressed with fondness, reflected in Arseni Khachaturan’s cinematography. Delicate tones of blues and oranges are only occasionally broken up by brutal imagery of violence. Maren moves through a world that, though containing violence, is ultimately beautiful. Her scenes of connection with Lee are not affected by mistrust nor doubt: the picnic scene, featured on the poster, shows them bathed in a warm light, contrasted with the shadowy house in which her scenes with the enigmatic Sully (Mark Rylance) take place.
Because of this innate sensibility, seeing them grapple with the consequences of their actions is heartbreaking. The audience sees Maren’s strong sense of right and wrong clash with Lee’s chaotic moral code. While she agonizes over so much as shoplifting, his sense of self and of his morality is much weaker. He goes from defending a woman being harassed at the grocery store, to justifying the brutal murder of a family man. He is scattered, chaotic, and wounded. Even his eclectic style, designed by Giulia Piersanti, mirrors an attempt from the character to piece himself together by stealing the clothes of his victims.
While love is the core theme, physical attraction is another essential aspect. More complex than romantic attraction, cannibalism is portrayed as a compulsion that runs deep. It is human attraction in the purest sense of the phrase. Not only can eaters smell each other, but all of these characters are, in some ways, marked by their need for human flesh. For Maren, it’s an inherited characteristic, one that leads her to find her mother and lose her father. In Lee, Chalamet displays an animalistic, almost feral physicality, especially after he feeds, depicting a ‘high’ typical of addictions. This connection between physical and emotional need is mirrored in their relationship, where physical attraction cannot exist without emotional vulnerability. Their unconditional love echoes in the title of the film, which refers to the practice of consuming the entirety of a person—bones and all.
Sully is probably the most disturbing character in this film. Toeing the line between hilarity and repulsion, Rylance embodies the most toxic manifestation of this ‘attraction’. As he explains in an early scene, feeding is a very personal process—one that he approaches with almost ritualistic mannerisms, dutifully collecting the hair of his victims to braid together. By sharing this experience with Maren, in his eyes, they become bound. Years of need for human connection explode, in the most frightening and disgusting display of the film, in the final act. Beyond simply sex and hunger, there is a truly haunting attempt to connect.
Keeping this film from perfection is the script. Though the themes of social isolation and love are common among the people Maren meets, the film feels somewhat scattered. While the nature of a road movie is to follow different adventures, the script struggles to find a throughline that consistently engages the viewer. The attention is split between Maren’s search for her mother, the love story with Lee, and the interactions with Sully. None of it is bad, it just doesn’t necessarily gel together seamlessly.
Bones and All is a beautifully directed film which, despite its gruesome premise, is an ode to love and human connection. The lead performances by Taylor Russell, Timothee Chalamet, and Mark Ryland elevate the at times patchy script to create a distinctly atmospheric film.
The Verdict
Those craving a gruesome story of cannibalism will be disappointed. In fact, the best part of Bones and All is not the blood and gore, but rather its unflinching fascination with love and human connection.
Words by Elisabetta Pulcini
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