Bones and All (2022)
“When the cops get here, we have to be good and gone”
What do you get if you fuse together a late teenager ostensibly locked away from the world for her own good by her Father, a razor thin and slightly older drifter who adores the glam rock band Kiss and another much older drifter who is toe-curlingly creepy and, like his younger outsiders from society, able to smell the near death and decay of a fresh corpse ripe for eating? Insert a 1980’s inspired soundtrack including Joy Division, New Order, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran and the aforementioned Kiss (plus a couple of early 1990’s tracks from my favourite band Radiohead that I didn’t pick up on during my first watch) and weave all of these musical choices around a gentle piano and acoustic guitar musical accompaniment from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and you have Bones And All, and you have a disturbing love story like no other.
Based on the 2015 novel of the same name written by Camille DeAngelis and written here for the screen by David Kajganich, Bones And All is the thirteenth feature length film directed by Luca Guadagnino and he follows his critically acclaimed duo of films Suspiria and Call Me By Your Name with this cannibal horror love story and road trip through 1980’s America.
Confused and abandoned, Maren (Taylor Russell) seeks the answers to an outsider’s life via her continual road trip and the audio tapes left for her by her Father as a way of filling in the gaps of her earlier life. Maren has a need to “feed” or “bone” and is a cannibalistic “eater” who, it is established in the film’s early frames, has ostensibly always been on the run as brilliantly described by her Father when he urgently declares “When the cops get here, we have to be good and gone”. With her Father’s narration reinforcing a background largely forgotten and via the medium of that staple of the 1980’s, a Sony Walkman, Maren believes herself to be largely alone and singular in her grotesque pursuit for human flesh before she stumbles into the life of other eaters, particularly “Sully” (Mark Rylance) and “Lee” (Timothee Chalamet). Whilst Maren “doesn’t want to hurt anybody”, Sully soon reinforces that they, and their kind, are far more prevalent than she’d previously believed and that he, and their kind once more, have an intrinsic ability to smell both each other and the near death on which they feed. “I ate my grandfather” Sully deadpans mid-way through the film “while we waited on the undertaker”.
As the title would suggest, the most voracious of eaters will consume the entire body, a proud boast of the otherwise smiling and carefree Lee in another superb performance from Timothee Chalamet. Mark Rylance excels as ever as the horribly chilling Sully, a man in the shadows yet whom stands tall and proud in the daylight, and both of these leading men admirably support an astounding central performance from a coming of age and coming to terms with the realities of a grisly life from Taylor Russell.
The Twilight franchise of films is an obvious touchstone here but the film that immediately filled my mind and thoughts, rightly or wrongly, was Oliver Stone’s grotesque Natural Born Killers from 1994. Bones And All has a very difficult subject matter to stomach, pun unintended, yet the musical soundtrack, individual song choices from the 1980’s and the aching love story of finding your soul mate as an outsider in a world you struggle to recognise, endeared me to a film that I didn’t wholly love or like, but which may age well with further re-watches.
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Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.