Rated: MA15+
Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Screenplay by: David Kajganich
Based on: Bones & All by Camille DeAngelis
Produced by: Luca Guadagnino, Theresa Park, Marco Morabito, David Kajganich
Cinematography: Arseni Khachaturan
Starring: Timothée Chalamet, Taylor Russell, Mark Rylance, Chloë Sevigny, Michael Stuhlbarg, Madeleine Hall, David Gordon Green and André Holland.
‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’
Bones and All is more drama than horror, where the focus is on the ordinary to make the monsters more believable.
Maren (Taylor Russell) is like any other teenager: she makes friends at school, plays piano, her dad (André Holland) sets a curfew. He locks her in at night.
That’s the first clue that something’s not quite right.
Then at a girls-night-in, Maren tears the flesh from the finger of her new friend. And it’s time to move on. Again.
Maren is an eater.
She’s pretty good at being on her own. When she goes in search of her mother (Chloë Sevigny), she finds out there’re other eaters out there. And they can smell if there’s another one around.
That’s when she meets Sully (Mark Rylance). With a matchstick in his mouth and a feather in his hat, he’s hard to miss.
Lee (Timothée Chalamet) is also an eater. But he doesn’t eat human flesh in his y-fronts like Sully. He dosses around, eats because he has to; and the rest of the time, he tries to be his normal self.
Lee’s the friend Maren never knew she could have.
They’re kinda sweet together. In between the eating.
There’s a strange poetry to the filming of Bones and All (cinematographer, Arseni Khachaturan), with shots like a tableau to illustrate moments of Lee and Maren’s journey: shots of blood, daisies in a glass jar, the empty rooms of a sanitised house, a beaded necklace left under a bed.
It’s quiet to make those moments poignant but also makes the journey slow and dry at times.
This is offset with the layering of Maren’s father, Frank’s voice on a cassette, telling her story; added together with flashbacks to nightmares as Maren and Lee struggle to be who they are, to be eaters. To eat people to live or the only other alternatives, suicide or being locked up.
Maybe love will save them.
It’s a point of difference, director Luca Guadagnino (some of his previous films: A Bigger Splash (2015) – loved it, Call Me by Your Name (2017) – award winning, and Suspiria (2018) – which I also enjoyed) giving the film a tone of normality; making the story about love, about the journey, about the ordinary, about the monsters.
With all the different threads and strangely quiet tone, it just didn’t quite pull together for me.
All the story’s there, but the tone didn’t hit quite right.
I enjoyed hearing the tapes from Maren’s father talking about her backstory, her origin more than the drama of it.
The film was made to make the eaters more human with a love story and family drama. They just happened to eat people – ‘how dare you make this harder.’
And we never find out why.