Bones and All Review: An ancient love story resurrected to a bloody new life

The urge to equate young love with doom and mortality probably extends well beyond Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet. It’s such a natural narrative pairing: first love rarely lasts, and adolescence definitely doesn’t.

For most people, that burning intensity of young love—that “everything is new and wonderful, and we’re the first people to ever experience sex” feeling of infatuation and discovery—is likely to fade quickly. And for adults looking back on that era in their lives, the sense of loss and nostalgia can feel similar to the emotions surrounding dealing with death. But the metaphor has seldom been as startlingly vivid as it is in Luca Guadagnino bones and alla gory shocker that has many familiar horror movie elements, but plays much more like a classic street romance.

It’s an odd film apparently designed to confuse both fans of Guadagnino’s previous horror film, the messy 2018 Giallo remake sighand fans of his suntanned gay romance of 2017 call me by your name While bones and all bridging these two films so neatly that it feels calculated, it also begs the question of how much audience overlap there might be between the two films. Horror dogs might be disappointed by how much of the film consists of low-key relationship drama and a coming-of-age story that offers little breathless tension building and jump scares. Romance drama fans will surely see more gory evisceration than they are used to seeing in their movies. But for genre-agnostic cinephiles, the sheer daring and uniqueness of the story — an adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 YA novel of the same name — will be a key part of the draw.

bones and all combines Guadagnino and call me by your name Star Timothée Chalamet for a second love story. But it takes a while for Chalamet to come into the picture. First of all, the film revolves around Maren (waves‘Taylor Russell), a high schooler with a bunch of secrets. Maren lives alone with her father (André Holland) in a run-down, crumbling house. A furtive sense of shame hangs over all the small details of their home and their interactions, but it takes a while for the film to reveal why that’s true and what they’re both navigating. And when the revelations come, they’re simultaneously terrifying and exciting, in part because the details are so unexpected.

Aside from preparing for copious amounts of blood and some short, intense violence, bones and all is the kind of film that is better experienced in the moment than in descriptions. Each new revelation about Maren’s past and present is carefully unfolded, partly because she doesn’t really understand her own nature and has to learn it along with the audience. Screenwriter David Kajganich (a writer, producer and developer of the well-loved horror series The Terror) never feels like he’s in a hurry to get to a certain part of the story. He and Guadagnino make plenty of room for Maren, who learns through conversation, first with new acquaintance Sully (Bridge of Spies‘ Mark Rylance, disappearing into yet another incredible performance), then with a newer acquaintance, Lee (Chalamet), a sophisticated boy her own age.

Viewers who don’t yet know the basic idea of ​​the film and want to experience it in the cinema should stop reading here. The early trailer and festival recaps for bones and all were shy about what makes Maren, Lee, and others different, but public descriptions of the film have widely shared the mystery: bones and all‘s wide-eyed central pair are both “eaters”, effectively ghouls driven to devour human flesh. Your victims don’t have to be alive, but once they start consuming human bodies, they have to continue or die. bones and all more or less follows in the footsteps of films Bonnie and Clyde to Terrence Malick wasteland putting two pretty people on the wrong side of the law and sending them on the run, but in this case it’s questionable how humane they are. And their crimes aren’t sexy and classy like Bonnie and Clyde’s bank robberies or the vampiric murders in The hunger — Guadagnino makes the consumption rituals bloody, grotesque and animalistic, an unpleasant matter of survival.

All of this gives him more leeway when it comes to romanticizing the connection between Lee and Maren. There is a centuries-old tradition of sexualizing monsters and predatory behavior, and bones and all leans in heavily, but still builds the story around the old coming-of-age patterns of protagonists finding themselves (and finding their courage in the process). Maren has a lot to deal with – a family secret, her first love, her first understanding that there are other eaters and rules that bind them. But most importantly, she must figure out who she is in and out of Lee’s shadow. He knows a lot more than she does about the world and the lives of the eaters, but she knows more about what she wants and who she hopes to be, and she must direct how her desires match his understanding of the world.

As call me by your name, bones and all is a sensual film, particularly visual – Guadagnino revels in the kind of expansive views of the sky and countryside that Andrea Arnold’s summer breaks similarly thematized American honey so memorable, and he illuminates his leads warmly by day and with a creeping fervor by night. But what’s more remarkable is how he and Kajganich navigate the back and forth between the story’s romantic elements and horror themes. There’s a big metaphor at play here, how parents, families, and friends allow deviant behavior until it feels normal, and how it can be difficult to properly move into the world when protected from the world. And it’s set in radically different ways at the same time: both through the lens of two young children on a romantic road trip and as two growing monsters who lure and kill other people.

An equally complex sense of attraction and repulsion plays a role in Maren and Lee’s relationship. They’re very different people who rarely seem right for each other — but they also share that central, unwavering resemblance, and the fact that neither of them knows another eater their age draws them together, even if they’re each other thereby infuriating their conflicting goals and beliefs. The filmmakers keep asking the questions with lively intensity throughout the film – should these children stick together or go their separate ways? Do they help each other as much as they hurt each other? It’s a lot of complication for a film about young love, and Guadagnino makes the boundaries of their relationship far more tense than any question of who might be chasing her or whom they might be chasing.

bones and all will be a hard sell for many viewers, given the odd way it straddles genres and tones. There’s almost a camp- element as they flee from their corpse latest victim. But the craftsmanship throughout the film is impressive and compelling. The casting and performances are shockingly gorgeous, especially when an almost unrecognizable Michael Stuhlbarg and director David Gordon Green drop by for a stunning single-scene cameo. And the whole thing is delightfully weird, the kind of movie that makes people go, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this the Forward.” This film draws on some old, old tropes and familiar ideas. But it does it in a way that makes them feel as new, fresh, and intoxicating as young love itself.

bones and all is now in cinemas.