Cannibalism stories come along every few years, and the best recent one remains Julia Ducourau’s Raw. Bones and All borrows liberally from it, equating one flesh-based passion with another more universal one while also allowing its protagonists an out by turning cannibalism into an addiction. Guadagnino’s vision is less animalistic than Ducournau’s, or is at least at a state of understanding that might’ve come after the events of Raw. In Bones and All, the characters know what they are and know what options they have. They’ve constructed moral universes that allow them to live with themselves. Maren, out in the world by herself for the first time and finding people like her where she used to think she was alone, is the audience surrogate, led around by first Sully and then Lee. The latter lays out her choices; a life in the shadows, quarantine and eventual insanity, or suicide. As the chemistry develops between Maren and Lee, her choice becomes self-evident and the film has to convince the viewer that she’s allowed to explore this good thing within the context of their monstrousness. It’s to theirs and the film’s great credit that this requires so little convincing. The way Russell and Chalamet hang off of and grab onto each other conveys a pathological need for each other. Despite having a lead character who’s introduced maiming a kind peer, Bones and All creates a surprising amount of rooting interest.
Complementing the film’s intense romance is its setting in a pre-stranger danger America, where things are a little more innocent and trusting within the small towns that Maren and Lee move through. Ritualistic cannibalism would become part of the Satanic Panic delirium soon to grip this region, and its more mundane, instinctual presentation here feels like a comment on what was actually happening in these communities. The abuse that needed to be imagined as Mephistophelian was going on in homes and churches and boy scout retreats. The perpetrators were always there. Guadagnino brings that kind of simmering terror to life with a character played by Michael Stuhlbarg in the polar opposite of his Call Me By Your Name role. Here, he’s a malevolent hillbilly eater in waders, accompanied by a cop apprentice (David Gordon Green) who doesn’t feel the cannibalism compulsion but wants to be an eater anyways. Maren and Lee share a campfire with this duo, and they are notably the only eaters in the film whose methods the viewer doesn’t get a glimpse of. Where Sully and Lee have rules, Stuhlbarg’s Jake doesn’t, and a film at even this level of extremity would have a difficult time conveying a picture of Jake in his violent element. The imagination runs as wild as a paranoid evangelical.
Guadagnino’s approach to horror in Bones and All has little in common with his Suspiria remake, a paranoid bloodfest that used its witches’ mind control powers as a political metaphor for Eastern Bloc surveillance. Suspiria’s evil elegance contrasts with Bones and All’s sweaty body horror and showcases Guadagnino’s versatility. The only similarity is in the way he films nightmares in quick cuts that don’t linger on shocking imagery but that nonetheless leave an impression. He consistently finds the most unsettling thing in the frame and draws the viewer’s eye to it. Coupled with a few glimpses of eaters who attack their victims like feral animals, captured in a first person perspective of wild eyes and gnashing teeth, Bones and All reinforces Guadagnino’s bona fides as a horror maestro across subgenres.
As previously mentioned, the film doesn’t work or resonate without viewer investment in the central twisted romance. Like Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde and Thelma and Louise before it, Bones and All finds a couple with a low-to-zero probability of success and somehow makes the viewer root against destiny or history. The primary credit for that has to go to Russell and Chalamet. As indelibly weird as Rylance and Stuhlbarg are, the film lives and dies by its two leads. As Chalamet’s star rises, these kinds of niche characters in low budget projects might be the first to go, but the fact that he would even agree to this part is what makes his success worth rooting for in the first place. Rangy and unpredictable, Chalamet’s Lee knows what his life is and what he should do about it, but he communicates a curiosity that prevents him from ending things too soon. He can bear the guilt and the shame if it gets him to a worthy vista, or more time with Maren. Russell, most memorable in the similarly emotionally intense Waves, breaks out here in a sensual performance that is so evocative that one can see her neurons making new connections. It’s a classic ingenue waking up to the world role, distilled through a cannibal road trip.
These kind of addiction metaphors are necessary as empathy tests, though the average junkie isn’t going to be as compelling as Maren and Lee. Most of the eaters in Bones and All hate themselves, but love the reason they hate themselves. Post-eating may as well be post-coital for how the actors play it. Being able to understand the hold that drugs have on a person, that the drug is the best and worst thing in a user’s life, is a tough sell for a populace that likes to think of themselves as masters of their domains as opposed to captured by a series of neurotransmitters. Guadagnino serves up this metaphor alongside top-notch filmmaking, and plugs in the heart for good measure. Bones and All has it all. A-