Bones and All (2022)

Score: 2 / 5

It begins with a typical coming-of-age scenario: '80s teenager Maren sneaks out of her Virginia home to a sleepover with friends. Well, "friends," as we're not entirely sure she's got close friends. This might be more of a charity case, as the other girls seem a bit more popular and of a higher economic class. While there, Maren and one of the nicer girls chat intimately under a coffee table until Maren erotically bites the girl's finger. Erotically, that is, until it isn't: blood pours out and the girl starts screaming. Maren flees into the night back to her single father's house, where he immediately begins packing and tells her they are relocating. He's done this before.

Bones and All is a curious film, something akin to a road movie (think Bonnie and Clyde or Thelma & Louise, or the recent Queen & Slim) with a fascination of impoverished rural America. After her eighteenth birthday, Maren's father abandons her, leaving only some money, her birth certificate, and a taped recording of his voice recounting the ways he can't be her father. Essentially, she's a cannibal -- apparently by natural instinct -- and she's eaten several people. Her mother had abandoned her as an infant, but Maren decides to try and find her for some answers and possibly some love. Taylor Russell plays Maren with no small amount of grit and determination, though her angst and general downcast demeanor leaves some nuance and depth to be desired.

On her own, she soon meets Sully (a typically magnificent Mark Rylance), from whom she learns much more about her condition. They call themselves "eaters," these cannibals, whose hunger is an innate imperative. They can identify each other through scent, apparently, and have established some general guidelines for behavior, like keeping their crimes secret of course and not eating certain kinds of people (namely, other eaters). Sully is an eccentric drifter, but he seems lonely and a little too clingy on this naive young girl he's discovered. Shortly after they feast on an elderly woman together, Maren flees him. He's not happy about it.

As with road movies -- or odysseys, as some might call them, though most don't lead the protagonists back home -- this one divides itself neatly by location, usually introducing episodes with onscreen state abbreviations. Soon after fleeing Sully, she meets Lee, a young male eater whose dispassionate killing is a bit hard to stomach for Maren. He's meant to be a heartthrob for her (and us), but as played by an equally dispassionate Timothée Chalamet, he's surly and lanky and dull. He puts forth minimal effort in being a vaguely tortured young man finding his own way and failing, and the character never leaves the realm of cheap young adult dark fantasy. It's almost embarrassing to watch him perform in this; then again, the character isn't particularly interesting either, so perhaps there's blame to share.

They meet up with his sister briefly in Kentucky, who doesn't know about his condition or lifestyle and berates him. They intersect with two traveling eaters (played by Michael Stuhlbarg and David Gordon Green), whose seemingly amorous and amoral characters are utterly chilling. They even discover the whereabouts of Maren's mother from her grandmother and Maren meets her, though the mother (Chloe Sevigny in a delicious little cameo) is utterly mad and incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital. She's also a cannibal -- indeed, cannibalized her own hands -- and her only meaningful interaction with her daughter is to attack her, convinced as she is that it's better to be dead than live like this.

Luca Guadagnino directs this adaptation by David Kajganich (The Invasion, Blood Creek, AMC's The Terror), with whom he collaborated on A Bigger Splash and Suspiria. They work hard to make real art out of the source material which, admittedly, I haven't read, but just can't be worthwhile if this is the result from such talented filmmakers. It seems they took what must be a young adult dark romance and tried to make it an arthouse exploration of young desire. Or something. Even apart from its embrace of the overpopulated and tired genre of road movies, Bones and All tries to visually mimic the works of Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven) and David Lowery (Ain't Them Bodies Saints, The Old Man and the Gun). Gorgeous rural landscapes and pastoral atmosphere makes for an earthy, transcendent love story, right?

Guadagnino pulls a lot of attention to Maren's father's voice recording (played by Andre Holland) as well as to photographs, suggesting perhaps humanity's fleeting existence, or the importance (and danger) of capturing images and moments in time, or even perhaps the intimacy implied by engaging with someone's likeness when they are not present. It's intriguing, but never really explored beyond casual interest. By the final act, the movie relies so heavily on flashbacks that I didn't much care what was really happening. There's a great final confrontation with Sully, easily the most interesting and scary scene of the film, but then the film concludes with a sickly sweet denouement that is over-explained by dialogue and neatly tied up by the wrong thematic conceit: love. In a movie that could have gone so many ways, the message is that there is always someone who has experienced your struggle and can help or hurt you. Who cares? Maybe that's a fault of the source material more than the film, but the filmmakers could have made it more interesting by far.