Bones and All is a strange, loud and bloody addition to the American road movie canon. Shot in Ohio, director Luca Guadagnino takes Call Me By Your Name star Timothée Chalamet on an adventure that takes his young and conflicted character across various Midwestern states. Along the way will be Taylor Russell, a rising young star who finally found her path to stardom in Bones and All , where she and Chalamet fight for a place in the human-inhabited world as a pair of cannibals. Nomads naturally have little appetite for food.
In many ways, Bones and Everything feels like an inevitable mishmash of Guadagnino past romance and horror genres. Its tormented romantic story is similar to the forbidden romance that the Italian director explored in Call Me By Your Name , and the scenes of bloody violence inevitably resemble the physical horror of Guadagnino 's 2018 remake of Suspiria . A surprisingly quiet film considering the subject matter of its story.
© Digital Trends Photo courtesy of Yannis Drakoulidis/Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Based on the 2015 novel by Camilla De Angelis, Bones and All Maren follows Earlie (Russell), a young girl whose lust for cannibals leads her to start her own business at age 18. On her journey to find her missing mother, Maren meets Lee (Scallum), a cannibal who has taken to a nomadic lifestyle, albeit a more violent one, because of Maren. The two quickly become close, forming a romance based on Mar and Lee's understanding and shared hunger.
Despite Maren's desire to be reunited with her mother, Bones and Everything moves at a slow pace that shows its undeniable connection to and hatred of the great American road movies of the past. An unusually acoustic and poignant score by Atticus Ross and Trent Rezor further underscores Bones and All 's connection to films like Paris, Texas , as it creates the same warm, aching atmosphere as Robbie's film set to Rye Cooder's folk music. Muller's cinematography is generally excellent. To the film's credit, Bones and All is perhaps the most spectacular exploration of the American countryside since directors Müller and Wim Wenders took that ill-fated trip to the US in 1984.
Guadagnino and cinematographer Arseny Khachaturan not only fill the bones and everything with beautiful sunny shots, they also showcase the mundanity of rural American architecture and life. Every house in the film seems to vibrate and shake under the weight of their faulty construction, and Guadagnino effectively contrasts the freedom of the American plains with the haunted atmosphere of Bones and All 's old houses, factories, and mental hospitals. Midwest
In a film often about the search for freedom and comfort, it shouldn't go unnoticed that Bones and All often returns to the image of the two characters sitting quietly in the vast and seemingly limitless fields of Ohio.
© Digital Trends Photo courtesy of Yannis Drakoulidis/Metro Goldwyn Mayer
What Bones and All has in beautiful texture and composition, it ultimately lacks in intensity. The film's plot is haphazard and haphazard, which wouldn't be a problem if Bones and All didn't end up tragically violent. Tonally and texturally, Guadagnino tries to split the difference between the American road movie, YA romance, and horror film, but the film often presents itself and its story in such a stilted, bloated way that it feels emotionally flat. .
Part of this is because Chalamet feels terrific as Lee. The actor's previous collaborations with Guadagnino made him a performer capable of tenderly portraying loneliness and longing, but neither he nor his director could bring the same believable warmth and inner conflict to Lee. Indeed, combined with Chalamet's inability to sell his sometimes awkward dialogue in Bones and All , it makes for a surprisingly flat and monotonous performance.
Russell, for his part, is doing much better. As Maren, the actress brings a youthful curiosity and warmth that the film and its central love story desperately need.
Guadagnino, intelligently or not, surrounds Russell and Chalamet with artists who have become far taller and scarier than them. The film's supporting cast is led by Mark Rylance, whose role as a socially awkward cannibal named Sally alternates between pathetic neediness and terrifying obsession. Meanwhile, Michael Stuhlbarg almost steals the entire film, in a scene that allows him to appear only in denim overalls and deliver a monologue about the joys of consuming another man, illuminated by the amber light of a nearby fire.
In one scene, Stuhlbarg's Bones and All is at its most dangerous and twisted, which is why it lasts so much longer than the rest of the film, which lacks the real bite of a tense cannibal at every moment.
Bones and Everything is in theaters now.