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 is, in short, the perfect thematic bridge between his coming-of-age tale of young adult romance and peachy exploration and his nearly three-hour exploration of guilt and grief expressed through dance and bloody magic: A cannibal romance that unfurls against the backdrop of the end of the Reagan era, suffused with the vivid passion of the YA novel that it’s based upon but without the franchise ambition that suffocates any attempt at making books from that genre into decent movies. Yet, since he emerged into the most recent stage of his career — the top of the pops, with the recognition, scrutiny, and subsequent calcification that can follow — Guadagnino remains impossible to strike out, as he’s knocked ’em over the damn fence every time he’s stepped up to the plate. It’s not as affable as Call Me By Your Name, nor as ambitious as Suspiria, but Bones and All proves to be its own enticing and engaging animal as it winds its way through the back roads, following its leads on to a new town and a new meal.
Something’s always been slightly wrong with Maren (Taylor Russell), who, on the surface, looks like a normal teenage girl, a polite and kind Virginia kid chafing against the rules her strict-but-loving father has imposed. One night, she sneaks out to join some friends at a sleepover, and the evening seems to be pretty typical for an 18-year-old kid in ’88 — gossip, nail polish, etc. – until she takes a nice large bite out of her host’s finger. The duo, as is the tradition at this point, given the number of incidents that have happened in the past, flee in the middle of the night and make their way to a new state. It’s then that her father decides he’s had enough, and splits in the middle of the night, only leaving behind a tape to explain his reasoning. It’s been happening since she was a child, he doesn’t understand it, and it was one of the reasons her mother left, though even that remains a mystery to him. But Maren’s alone in the world now, so she decides to seek out whatever family she might have left: that mother that remains unknowable, somewhere out there in the American ether.
Yet, upon arriving in Columbus from Maryland, she soon discovers that she isn’t alone in the world, at least by kind. A ponytailed drifter makes his way towards her, claiming that he can “smell” her, that he knows what she is, and even better, he has a food source for her: a woman, slowly dying on the floor of her home. His name is Sully (a genuinely astonishing Mark Rylance), and he is, to say the absolute least, creepy as fuck. But he’s also the first person to encourage Maren to embrace her nature, even if their ideas of it might not exactly jive, and to be fair, few would want to spend their mornings watching a guy like he, clad in blood-stained briefs and undershirt, show off the eight-foot-long braid he’s made out of hair from the people he’s eaten over the years. When she leaves him in the middle of the night, she stumbles upon a much more kindred spirit in the form of Lee (Timothee Chalamet, great as always), a rakish but good-hearted punk who loves him some KISS and doting upon his little sister. He’s on the lam, jacking cars from his victims and taking care to try and choose folks who have it coming to them, nursing a deep hurt from his childhood. And, as you might expect, he joins up with her to try and find her mother, and they slowly fall for each other along the way, through thick and thin. But the answers Maren will find aren’t what she hoped, and Sully’s brown van seems to be lurking around every corner.
Despite the flashy natures of its premise, Bones and All shares more texturally with something like Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, another American travelogue featuring a character on a quest to find their mother alongside a partner that they don’t know if they fully trust or love or not. These characters live on the margins in the plains and hamlets, making their way through small towns that are also going through their own strange metamorphoses as these once-thriving communities crumble in the face of emergent modernity. It’s rare to see the ’80s used as an interesting setting beyond providing the mere creature comforts of safely-distant nostalgia for an audience (and a filmmaker) who lived through the decade as adolescents, and there are moments in which Guadagnino reverts to the mean — like, say, a needledrop of Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” deployed at a poignant point (is it the cheapest song in their catalog? One might think “Love Will Tear Us Apart” would be better). But there’s a pointed critique behind its usage: All that’s left is, in fact, the bones of these communities, as the rampant rise of neoliberalism and Reaganomics have torn through the skin and sinew and consumed almost all of what once made them thrive. Yet Guadagnino refuses to let this get in the way of the film’s romance, instead letting it haunt the frame and underwrite the gorgeous shots of sun-drenched plains and large blue skies.
In an ironic spin on Call Me By Your Name‘s most moving scene, the film’s title is explained by none other than Michael Stuhlbarg, who makes a cameo as a swamp cannibal that fell in love with a policeman (played by David Gordon Green, who is here as much for his creepy grin as he is for being an acknowledgment of the journey that the Suspiria remake took to the screen) mid-meal. It refers to the final stage one of these cannibals reaches: when they’re so consumed by hunger that they make their way through the whole carcass without stopping to, you know, remember how hard it is to eat ossified, spongey bone. This rampant, uncontrollable consumption is the crux of their journey, and it’s a distinctly American spin on it, contrasted with something like Julia Ducournau’s Raw, which saw it, in her characters, as a stage of self-realization grounded in hereditary means. The latter plays a role in what little world-building there is here (and thank god they resisted the urge to go full-on Vampire: The Masquerade or whatever), but Guadagnino is interested in exploring his characters’ reactions to their urges more so than defaulting to a pale imitation of the icky and visceral experience Raw provided for its viewers. This adds to the binding nature of the core romance, increases the dread through the conflict, and ultimately leads to the sad conclusion — an act of grieving consumption not unlike the apple in Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night or Rooney Mara’s pie-eating marathon in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story. But for whatever reason, I thought of a slightly altered version of a line from Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are as Trent Reznor started to sing over the credits roll: “I’ll eat you up, I loved you so.”