Bones and All horribly good
BONES AND ALL
★★★★ out of 5 Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Taylor Russell, Mark Rylance Director: Luca Guadagnino Duration: 2 h 10 m Available: In theatres
CHRIS KNIGHT
I'm not in the habit of quoting Wikipedia — well, not openly at any rate — but the phrase “coming-of-age romantic horror road film” is hard to beat as a descriptor for the strange, oddly affecting movie that is Bones and All. Based on the 2015 novel by Camille Deangelis, the film plays like a cross between Let the Right One In and Only Lovers Left Alive. Or maybe Natural Born Killers.
Taylor Russell stars as Maren, growing up with her single dad in Maryland, circa 1988. When a classmate invites her to a sleepover, she sneaks out of her home and attends, only to cause a panic by gnawing her host's finger off. It's a freakishly gruesome and disturbing scene, suggesting the stirrings of a lesbian encounter before everyone — the victim, the other girls, the audience, maybe even Maren herself — realizes what is happening.
Back home, her dad (André Holland) reacts by walking out on her. He leaves behind some money, her birth certificate (including the name of her mother) and a tape-recorded note. It hasn't happened often, but this is clearly one time too many. She's 18, and on her own.
As with that opening scene, the film takes its time exploring the nature of Maren's, um, condition. We eventually find out that she's called an eater — something between a vampire and a cannibal — and that whatever drives her to occasionally feast on human flesh is a physiological need rather than a psychiatric disorder.
And there are others of her kind. Not too many, but more than you might expect, according to Sully (Mark Rylance), the first fellow eater she meets. He takes her under his wing, teaches her a few things (like how to literally sniff out another eater) and admits that his own condition first manifested when he ate his grandfather while waiting for the undertaker to arrive. He strives not to kill unnecessarily, and has developed a knack for sensing when someone is about to expire of natural causes. Despite all this helpful advice, Sully gives off a stench of creepiness barely concealed by his forced jocularity, and Maren soon moves on, eventually falling in with Lee (Timothée Chalamet), closer to her own age and temperament. With a pickup truck lifted from a guy who — well, let's just say he won't be needing it — the two young people take to the highway, worried of potentially being found out, but also looking for Maren's mother, if she's still alive.
Italian director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Suspiria) infuses the story with a kind of pastoral calmness quite out of keeping with the subject matter. The score tends toward gentle guitar music rather than orchestral horror numbers, for instance. And in a perfect if slightly inside-baseball casting choice, there's a small role for David Gordon Green, the director of such early-century drama as All the Real Girls and Snow Angels, but also the recently wrapped Halloween trilogy.
Bones and All feels like that cinema rarity, a unique and unheralded story, neither part of an existing universe of intellectual property nor crying out to beget one. What's more, you'll feel the fog of it in your lungs after leaving the theatre. It's disturbing in the best possible way.