Bones and All (2022)
I haven’t been left this disappointed by so promising a movie in a very long time. Bones and All saw Italian director Luca Guadagnino reunite with Timothée Chalamet for the first time since 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, a superb romance movie that became an instant classic. Their new project was a bizarre mix of teen romance, the road movie and cannibalism. Bones and All was set to be an arty crossover hit, a young adult movie that would appeal to teenagers and cinephiles alike. Despite glowing early reviews and the big names attached to the project, in a little over two years Guadagnino’s movie has fallen into a rapid obscurity. It underperformed at the box office and I’ve never heard anyone mention the picture since its release. Realising this, I sought the film out and found myself at a loss for words. I was hit by an overwhelming mix of love and hate that has since curdled into weary disappointment.
Maren (Taylor Russell) is a special kind of cannibal. She’s an ‘eater’, a person afflicted by an insatiable, vampiric desire to feed on human flesh. She can’t control it. After protecting her for 18 years, Maren’s father abandons her and leaves a cassette recording explaining her condition. Maren crosses the United States in search of the mother that she’s never met, hoping to learn more about her affliction. Along the way she meets fellow eaters. Sully (Mark Rylance) is an older man with a deceptively soft southern accent. He’s intense and sinister, but insists that he only wants to help guide Maren through her new life. She then meets Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a young eater who soon becomes her boyfriend. The two go on a road trip, encountering family and fellow eaters as they grow closer to one another. I was hooked by the premise and enthralled by Guadagnino’s overwhelming technical skill, until I encountered a problem.
The problem is Chalamet. He plays his part like a self-aware teen heartthrob and I find it utterly insufferable. He’s a manic pixie dream boy, a Tumblr obsessive’s elfin object of obsession. He wears band t-shirts and ripped jeans, smiles to himself, makes little quips about kissing and stares moodily into the distance like a male model in an overplayed perfume ad. There’s no vulnerability, no edge, no emotion, no character, no soul, no flaws, no depth and no reason for me to care about him. He’s just a very pretty young man who happens to be a cannibal. Compare this to Chalamet’s nervy, precocious, awkward, teary teenager in Call Me By Your Name. That was a character, that was a recognisable human being who made rash decisions, fell in love with the wrong person and learnt to live with loneliness and words that should have been left unsaid. In Guadagnino’s follow-up, he’s in permanent superstar mode and I find it as boring as it is off-putting. If this character was a little less smug and a little more human, it could have rescued everything.
As it is, the romance is flat and dead from the moment that it stumbles onto the screen. Aside from the odd bit of people-eating, Guadagnino presents us with a surprisingly bland relationship between two conventionally attractive people who get along very well. I couldn’t find any reason to care about either of them and I found their superficial romance glib and incredibly shallow. If cannibals had Instagram, Lee and Maren would be the cringeworthy couple that fills up your feed with holiday snaps and pictures of them kissing each other in front of sunsets. Perhaps it’s just me, but any movie about two conventionally attractive people in a happy, cute, quirky relationship leaves me bored and a little nauseous. I need some drama, I need some loneliness, I need some obsession, some self-loathing, some conflict, some mistakes, something fallible and human and identifiable. When Chalamet gives his obligatory emotional speech and the generic score swelled, I rolled my eyes. I didn’t buy it.
Guadagnino pins the entire film’s success on the Lee-Maren relationship. It’s the very heart of Bones and All, and the movie’s climax depends upon you caring about it. I didn’t. The very final image is a call back to an earlier scene, and it ended the movie on a vacuous note of inconclusiveness. This is supposed to be a sweeping romance, a heart-stopping update of Badlands with the passion of Casablanca. Instead, it felt like seeing a celebrity couple embracing on the red carpet, overdoing it a bit to make a scene for the paparazzi. If I was a teenage girl on a sleepover, I may well have loved it. As a pudgy 25-year-old man, I felt like a divorced dad at a Taylor Swift concert. This is a huge shame, because everything around the romance is one step shy of greatness. Every other performance, Arseni Khachaturan’s gorgeously textured cinematography, the film’s premise and its villain are all magnificent. I want to like this movie, but the supreme focus that it places on its very worst aspect makes my task impossible.
The first thirty minutes of Bones and All is one of the greatest short films that I’ve ever seen. It’s a bravura stretch of filmmaking, establishing menace, tone, mystery and hope with sparse details, staggering images and moments of quiet devastation and bloody horror. We’re introduced to Maren, have her eating problem revealed in a moment of genuine fear and sadness, learn the hardship of her father’s life and have a hell of a premise set up with his cassette tape goodbye. Maren has to find her mother and father, learn to control her dangerous fixation and discover more about the ways of the eaters. In a beautiful tracking shot following a greyhound bus across a bridge, the potency, sadness and secrecy of her life and her new quest are overwhelming. The introduction of the threatening but paternalistic Sully teases an even better film: a vampiric relationship of mentor and mentee. Then everything changes.
After the thirty minute mark, Chalamet enters the movie and the ominous tone melts into golden syrup. Before you know it, the young actor is posing shirtless and dancing around his bedroom to a Kiss song like a quirky, lovable teenager. This is the point where the film drops its mystery, the mechanics of the ‘eater’ society are subordinated to the lifeless romance and every other plot thread is more or less abandoned. Only after the film wrapped up did I realise that it was annoyingly incomplete. Where did Maren’s dad go? What will happen to her mother? What will Maren do? Are there other eaters? The opening thirty minutes promised so much before the stale romance robbed me of a better film. There are still a couple of fascinating teases. Maren and Lee meet an eater and his partner: a willing cannibal, a ‘normal person’ without the eater bug. I wanted the film to explore these questions and these characters, but it ditches them in favour of a series of kisses and cuddles designed to be chopped up and replayed endlessly on TikTok.
Mark Rylance’s performance is a work of art. It’s haunting, incredibly unsettling and strangely (almost disturbingly) sympathetic. In the hands of a lesser actor, Sully would be a bland villain, an obvious threat who should be avoided and ignored. With Rylance’s soft tones and open eyes, he’s a figure of quiet pity and tarnished dignity. He’s lived with his curse for decades. He’s a killer like the other eaters, but he isn’t glib, he doesn’t celebrate his work and he’s lived alone for far too long. Is he in love with Maren? Does he want to become her surrogate father? Is he predatory or protective? How about both? Rylance keeps the ambiguity alive and he’s absolutely electric. No one can match his energy and he dominates every second of the time that he’s on screen. Sully is creepy. He’s threatening, violent and unstable, but then he’s an eater. What do you expect of him? This is a character strong enough to carry a series of movies, and he’s side-lined to make room for Chalamet’s ripped jeans.
Bones and All is the very worst kind of disappointment. There’s greatness in it. There’s a modern American classic buried in the DNA of this film, kicking and screaming under the cold earth of a puerile love story. I want the Rylance movie. I want the story of the young woman introduced into the vampiric underworld of the eaters, who has an uneasy relationship with her troubled mentor and discovers the full truth behind her parents and their absence. I want to know how the eaters deal with willing cannibals, I want to know if eaters have achieved power, I want to know if Maren will reject their society or succumb to it. I don’t want to see a subpar teen romance so high on Chalamet’s burgeoning star power that it forgets about emotion, drama and conflict. Bones and All has great ideas but it’s too cowardly to explore them. It lazily leans on its young star and falls into a pit of insipid mediocrity.