Bones and All was directed by Italian master Luca Guadagnino, who made his name with three very different films – the chilly family saga I Am Love, the likeable coming-of-age film Call Me by Your Name, and the full-blooded Italian horror, Suspiria.
Bones and All is clearly Guadagnino wearing the Suspiria hat.
This film is about cannibalism – not the real thing but imagining that it’s a disability shared by a small minority of people.
People like teenager Maren, who succumbs at a friend’s sleepover. She rushes home where Dad, her sole parent, once again packs up and they’re forced to flee.
But this time Dad has reached the end of his tether. That night he leaves Maren some money and hightails it out of her life.
He also leaves a cassette tape telling her that her mother may still be alive.
Did Maren inherit the cannibal gene from her mother? And if she’s alive, where is she?
Maren takes off to find her, a journey that takes her across the red-state heartland of America - Maryland, Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska. And along the way she meets another “eater” – the painfully thin Lee.
I say “painfully thin” but on Timothée Chalamet it looks good. Right now, after a string of well-chosen titles including the smarter-than-most blockbuster Dune, Chalamet is pretty much the biggest young star in movies.
Though, as Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp did before him, he’s made his name in essentially support roles like this.
Actual star Taylor Russell has the hardest job in Bones and All. After the alarming opening scene, she has to make us fall in love with Maren, despite…. Well, despite everything.
And while we’ve been softened up by, you’d think, equally challenging vampire and werewolf movies, cannibals remain one step beyond.
It’s the Uncanny Valley phenomenon. They’re like us, but not at all like us.
And to underline that fact, before Maren met Lee she’d met an older version – Sully, played by an increasingly disturbing Mark Rylance.
It seems eaters have the ability to find each other through their heightened sense of smell.
This is good when it involves finding likable fellow-travellers like Lee, and less good when it means just about everyone else she meets along the way.
Lee offers Maren a lift to help find her mother, and the cross-country road-trip, predictably brings two lonely people together.
Though they start to realise that their lives will become more and more dictated by their condition.
Why is it so many horror classics are written by women – going right back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?
Camille DeAngelis’s original novel was clearly an allegory about discovering and accepting who you are – no wonder it’s proved so popular among young people. And like the movie and now TV series Let the Right One In, which Bones and All often resembles, it offers permission to embrace your dark side.
It could also be seen as an excuse for any sort of anti-social behaviour, of course.
The fact that Bones and All isn’t that is down to a sensitive script and direction, but most of all the star performances of Russell and Chalamet. We come to accept Maren and Lee, as much for what they’re not as what they are.
In a way it’s a monster hunt, from the point of view of two of the monsters - like many of the great horror stories, including Frankenstein.
And despite the apparently bloodthirsty premise, Bones and All is a great one too – possibly Guadagnino’s best to date. But obviously, if you’ll excuse the expression, not for all tastes.
