Bones and All (2022)
Directed by Luca Guadagnino
Abandoned by her father, a young woman embarks on a thousand-mile odyssey through the backroads of America where she meets a disenfranchised drifter. But despite their best efforts, all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and to a final stand that will determine whether their love can survive their otherness.
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By now “Bones and All”—the title refers to the consumption of an entire body, down to the last morsel (a rare occurrence)—has turned into a picaresque, a road movie punctuated by horrendous moments that, in terms of blood and gore, go far beyond the killings of a film like “Badlands,” in which sparks of romance have begun to sprout between two unusual young people, both sympathetic and dangerous.
What ensues plays clear tribute to Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” the two traveling across the country through golden-hour vistas, but the film is far more tender toward its leads, shooting everything from a tentative first kiss in a slaughterhouse to a swim in a Kentucky lake with a childlike sense of wonder.
That’s what we get with the Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s equal parts elegant and grotesque road-trip saga “Bones and All,” which has a “Badlands” meets “Near Dark” vibe and contains a couple of genuinely effective shock moments, but ultimately comes across as a gratuitously violent and at times overwrought Young Adult drama dressed up with art-house accessories.
But when he lingers, as in a sequence set at a remote Nebraska gas station that reminded me as much of the Starkweather sequence from Matthew Barney as it did Springsteen's Nebraska and Malick's Badlands , it's rapture.
As love blossoms along the open road, their relationship evokes the Bonnie and Clyde -esque abstractions of Badlands, in its innocent deadliness.
It makes sense that one of the inspirations was the outlaw lovers of Badlands .
Determined to track down her long-absent mother and learn how she came to be this way, Maren buys a Greyhound bus ticket and heads across the country, discovering in uncanny, nocturnal sequences reminiscent of both Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys that she’s far from alone in her appetites.
That’s what we get with the Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s equal parts elegant and grotesque road-trip saga “Bones and All,” which has a “Badlands” meets “Near Dark” vibe and contains a couple of genuinely effective shock moments, but ultimately comes across as a gratuitously violent and at times overwrought Young Adult drama dressed up with art-house accessories.
Meanwhile, Maren and Lee’s dynamic most closely recalls that of the two moody yet visceral vamps in Near Dark (1987), both in their moral questions about killing to survive and the strange spell their romantic chemistry casts on the viewer.
In a bus-station sequence that reminded me of Caleb's attempts to get home after being bitten by a vampire in Near Dark , Marin starts in the direction of an address on an old, folded birth certificate her father's left her.
Choose your plan ArrowRight With its aestheticized gore; moody teenage angst; and knowing references to such classics as “Badlands,” “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Near Dark,” Luca Guadagnino’s visualization of Camille DeAngelis’s young-adult novel plunges audiences into a gross but occasionally engrossing slough of cognitive dissonance.
Or Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire-outsider western Near Dark?
The filmmaking is accomplished, even inventive in places, and yet for all the obvious effort, it mostly succeeds in reminding us of other, better stabs at similar themes and imagery, including and especially Claire Denis’s 2001 thriller Trouble Every Day , with its nightmarish conflation of death and desire.
Or maybe it is Claire Denis’s body-horror romance of Trouble Every Day that Guadagnino is channelling here.
Claire Denis did something similar with her 2001 French horror Trouble Every Day , and Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2017 The Bad Batch chewed that same bone.
From Claire Denis' masterpiece of desire Trouble Every Day to the zom-rom-com Warm Bodies .
Maren’s outpouring additionally fails to resonate because it’s never entirely clear whether Guadagnino and company are trying to make a cold, hollowed-out account of the way this kind of lifestyle erodes the soul as Claire Denis captured in 2001’s Trouble Every Day , or a lovers on the run paean to the secret beauty of the Middle American backwoods.
With films such as Julia Ducournau’s Raw , Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day , and even Antonia Bird’s Ravenous , cannibalism transcends gory spectacle into discussions of consumption, rage, and burning desire.
As love blossoms along the open road, their relationship evokes the Bonnie and Clyde -esque abstractions of Badlands, in its innocent deadliness.
Beneath the visceral shock of its premise — and trust that there will be blood, along with torn skin and tendons and at least several organs á la carte — is less a straightforward horror exercise than a road-trip romance edged in darkness, in the vein of Badlands or Bonnie and Clyde or even Thelma & Louise .
Choose your plan ArrowRight With its aestheticized gore; moody teenage angst; and knowing references to such classics as “Badlands,” “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Near Dark,” Luca Guadagnino’s visualization of Camille DeAngelis’s young-adult novel plunges audiences into a gross but occasionally engrossing slough of cognitive dissonance.
Bones and All more or less follows in the footsteps of movies from Bonnie and Clyde to Terrence Malick’s Badlands in putting a pair of pretty people on the wrong side of the law and sending them on the run, but in this case, it’s questionable how human they are.
Guadagnino’s darkly dreamy film, which opens in select theaters Friday, has some of the spirit of iconic love-on-the-run films like Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and Nicholas Ray’s “They Live By Night” — movies that as open-road odysseys double as portraits of America.
Strip the flesh from the bones of the latest film by Luca Guadagnino and the skeletal story framework is a familiar one: it’s an outlaw lovers road movie, sharing DNA with dustbowl odysseys such as Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde .
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Based on a 2015 YA novel by Camille DeAngelis set in the 1980s, it opens with a situation not unlike the start of Tomas Alfredson’s child-vampire film “Let the Right One In” and Matt Reeves’s English-language remake “Let Me In”: teen Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell) lives in Virginia with her father Frank (André Holland), who carefully locks her into her bedroom each night.
The delicate mood and melancholy restraint — shaped in part by the quiet, acoustic foundations from which Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ atmospheric score gradually builds — initially recall Tomas Alfredson’s gorgeous Let the Right One In , another emotionally layered first love depiction that featured a conflicted guardian and a female adolescent with a different kind of need to feed.
It has glimmers of style that are reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood , Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In while also being its own artful entity with a singular voice that’s worth jamming on repeat.
But Guadagnino’s seventh feature is unlikely to remind most viewers of that, or any of the other hybrid horror dramas that have come our way since Let the Right One In .
It allows Guadagnino to embrace various influences ranging from Badlands to Let the Right One In .
Initially, it seems like we’re in for a Let the Right One In -style tale of a parent shuttling their monstrous yet still beloved child to the next American backwater, where they can both start anew.
But it’s not the silk of Tilda Swinton’s fabrics or the hairs in Ralph Fiennes’ beard this time around—the feels of Bones and All are grungy stuff, far more reminiscent of the work of Andrea Arnold (most especially American Honey ) than anything he’s done previously.
Maren's search for the mother she's never known, and the necessity of having to leave the scene of various crimes, drive the pair across the Midwest, in sequences that also recall recent films like Andrea Arnold's great reckless-youth elegy American Honey .
Like Call Me by Your Name , Bones and All is a sensual movie, particularly visually — Guadagnino luxuriates in the kind of big-sky-country vistas that made Andrea Arnold’s similarly summer-break-themed American Honey so memorable, and he lights his leads warmly in the day and with skulking fervor at night.
If you fell for the kind of dreamy union depicted in Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, then just replace the sweet stuff with the red stuff and you’ll have an idea of what this achieves.
With Bones and All , Luca Guadagnino combines the romantic coming-of-age story of Call Me By Your Name with the realist horror of his Suspiria adaptation, taking a melancholic approach to the story of a condition that compels its sufferers to consume human flesh.
If asked to order the last few years of Luca Guadagnino’s career without any knowledge or context of his work and its production beyond the films’ plots and themes, one probably would slate his latest, Bones and All , as coming in between Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria rather than coming after the latter.
Adapted from Camille DeAngelis’s 2015 novel by Guadagnino’s frequent collaborator David Kajganich (he also penned A Bigger Splash and Suspiria ), Bones and All mirrors the callow volatility of its protagonist.
It’s regularly upsetting because it’s the sort of decidedly un- frenzied feeding you’d expect from director Luca Guadagnino, who fuses the spooky vibes of his 2018 Suspiria remake with the swooning romanticism of 2017’s Call Me By Your Name .
Based on Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 book and adapted by Suspiria screenwriter David Kajganich, Bones and All belongs heart and soul (and gristle) to Taylor Russell, who’s channeling much of that magnificently forthright sense of self and presence that she’s previously put to such good use in films like Waves and the Escape Room franchise (yes, seriously, we love the Escape Room movies here).
Given the sun-drenched, mellow vibes of his biggest hit, it still seems surpassingly bizarre that Guadagnino’s next move was to try to remake Suspiria , his elder countryman Dario Argento’s canonical 1977 giallo , a movie that not only got everything right the first time, but did it with such distinctive, idiosyncratic flair that any attempts at replicating it would be doomed to fail.
Whether loosely rethinking Jacques Deray’s film La Piscine (1969) into A Bigger Splash (2015), translating an André Aciman book into the 2015 film Call Me By Your Name, or remaking Dario Argento in 2017 with a superior version of Suspiria, it’s Guadagnino’s attention to character, theme, and atmosphere that elevates his take on established stories.
Adapted from Camille DeAngelis’ 2016 YA novel and working off a script from favored Guadagnino screenwriter David Kajganich (the aforementioned Suspiria as well as the inscrutable La Piscine remake, A Bigger Splash), Bones and All operates in an unusual tonal space, bringing a sense of near fairytale whimsy to a project that features a teen girl getting her fingers chomped off in its first 10 minutes.
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The beguiling opening scenes of Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All recall his warm, wonderful queer romance Call Me By Your Name .
With Bones and All , Luca Guadagnino combines the romantic coming-of-age story of Call Me By Your Name with the realist horror of his Suspiria adaptation, taking a melancholic approach to the story of a condition that compels its sufferers to consume human flesh.
If asked to order the last few years of Luca Guadagnino’s career without any knowledge or context of his work and its production beyond the films’ plots and themes, one probably would slate his latest, Bones and All , as coming in between Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria rather than coming after the latter.
It’s regularly upsetting because it’s the sort of decidedly un- frenzied feeding you’d expect from director Luca Guadagnino, who fuses the spooky vibes of his 2018 Suspiria remake with the swooning romanticism of 2017’s Call Me By Your Name .
And just as in the director’s best-known works – A Bigger Splash, Call Me By Your Name, his gonzo remake of Suspiria – themes are in constant service of style.
One assumes that Timothee Chalamet was cast because he’s generally regarded as a “hot” commodity and because Guadagnino is familiar with him from Call Me By Your Name, but he’s not a good match for Lee, who preens too much.
But by the time he’s shooting Lee smashing a hapless victim with a crowbar like one of the apes from 2001 (or Daniel Day-Lewis at the end of There Will Be Blood ), he’s moved into a realm of citation for its own sake, too obvious to be scary.
It has glimmers of style that are reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood , Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In while also being its own artful entity with a singular voice that’s worth jamming on repeat.