Bones and All
Directed by Luca Guadagnino (R) Two young cannibals fall in love.
“Of all the strange detours taken in recent years by major international filmmakers, Luca Guadagnino’s hard turn into body horror is perhaps the hardest to reconcile,” said Adam Nayman in The Ringer. The Italian director’s 2017 sunkissed romantic drama, Call Me by Your Name, was “one of the more beloved prestige pictures of recent years.” Now, after his “obscenely violent” 2018 remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria, he’s doubled down on shock content with this “ludicrous” cannibal romance drama. Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet co-star as teenage drifters forced to live nomadic lives because they’re “eaters”—people with a compulsion to eat human flesh. “There’s no clear metaphor here,” only “pure, audience-baiting provocation.” Open your mind, though, and it’s obvious that cannibalism stands in for any trait that might push an individual to the margins of society, said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. “The movie’s first third or so is truly haunting,” as circumstances force Russell’s Maren to set out on her own for the first time, and she never stops being compellingly watchable as a young woman who’s fighting both self-revulsion and a fear of ending up alone. Bones and All can feel remote at times, but it’s “never boring.” Still, the film, as a whole, “never quite hangs together,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Its rewards “wind up being incidental and, sadly, fleeting—an effectively grisly scene here, an arresting performance there.” Though it “goes through the motions” of being both a road movie and a romance, it “never really finds an animating energy to drive it along.” (In theaters only)