Film Review — Bones and All
Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell are cannibal lovers on the run, in Luca Guadagnino’s horror romance road movie
Although I was impressed by A Bigger Splash and Call Me by Your Name, I wasn’t convinced by Luca Guadagnino’s last film, his remake of Dario Argento’s horror classic Suspiria. It was overlong and had too many superfluous subplots bolted onto the horror in a rather stuffily self-conscious quest for contemporary political resonance. Bones and All, his adaptation of the novel by Camille DeAngelis, is still a bit baggy, but I enjoyed it a lot more, and found it convincing as an agreeably melodramatic, gruesome, twisted cannibal horror romance.
Set in the mid-1980s, the plot involves the teenage Maren (Taylor Russell), whose strict father is aware of her cannibalistic tendencies, and is rather at his wits end moving from town to town under different names, whenever she has an incident. Early in the film, he abandons her, leaving a Basil Exposition tape recording detailing some of her origins, which Maren promptly decides to look into herself after drying her tears. Joining her on a quest to track down her birth mother is young fellow cannibal Lee (Timothée Chalamet), to whom she is romantically drawn. Along the way, she also encounters rather creepy older cannibal Sully (Mark Rylance)…
