Bones and All

‘I ate my own granddad!’ proclaims one of the characters in Luca Guadagnino’s gritty, grimy, gristly horror romance, based on YA novel Bones & All by Camille DeAngelis and playing like a Twilight teen fever-dream with added depth and pretention. Working again with screenwriter David Kajganich, who made something of a botch of his madcap Suspiria remake, Guadagnino has constructed a lengthy (130 mins) road movie about two lovers fleeing an unwanted tragic destiny; it’s the same old story, but jazzed up with some good acting and a few nasty bursts of gore.

So we’re talking about some fine young cannibals; Maren Yeary (the excellent Taylor Russell) doesn’t yet know about her own peculiar genetic make-up. Her dad clearly does; he locks her in her room at night to stop her from getting out and munching on her pals. You can insert you own parental repression, cannibalism= sexuality metaphor here, and since Guadagnino loves a few dashes of self-serious political allusion, we get a dash of footage showing disgraced NYC mayor Rudi Giuliani; the setting is the scuzzy, disreputable 80’s as seen from now. Maren can’t resist biting a chunk out of an unwary pal’s finger at a sleepover, and her dad promptly scarpers, leaving her a cassette tape explaining her condition, which she listens to as she moves listlessly from state to state by Greyhound bus…

Maren Yeary is only 18 years old, and seeks definition via the men in her life; firstly Mark Rylance as experienced cannibal Sully, with a keen sense of smell for predators and victims, and zero moral code about pouncing on the innocent. Sully shows Maren how to hunt and kill (“Life is never dully with Sully!’) but she is haunted by the morality, or lack of any sense of it, in his actions. Escaping, Maren runs into the more acceptable face of cannibalism in the smoking hot form of Lee, played by Dune’s Timothée Chalamet. Lee introduces Maren to the joys of wigging out to Kiss at top volume, but his own moral code turns out to be as unreliable as Sully’s; just who should a girl look up to when all she wants is to be the best cannibal she can be? Maybe her mother (Chloe Sevigny) has the answers…

Guadagnino’s movies (A Bigger Splash, Call Me By Your Name) have plenty of adherents, but this looks more like a dust-bowl-chic centre-spread in a posho fashion magazine than an actual drama. The men’s fashions showcased in Bones and All offer a horror that’s far beyond eating people; Chalamet spots a set of ripped TF Bananarama jeans and a hideous two-tone Duckie Dale mullet, while Rylance favours a feathered hat combo alongside tighty-whitey vest and pants underwear. And we’ve not even cast a critical eye over Michael Stulbarg’s beige dungaree ensemble, David Gordon Green’s Dokken t-shirt or the eye-melting Mona Lisa carny-shirt that other minor characters wear; dressing movie stars down has always been a thing, but Bones and All has an idiosyncratic, hardscrabble style all of its own in place of a plot.

‘Let’s be people now,’ Maren concludes at the end of her meandering journey, and she’s probably right; there’s only so much fun to be had acting like monsters, and our happy couple settle down to suburban normality before a conventional predictable horror climax resolves things. The soundtrack, ranging all the way from Joy Division to New Order, is well chosen, the acting is superb, but somehow Bones And All doesn’t add up to much more than an alternative Twilight universe; other than the usual observation of teenage outsiders who refuse to conform to the worst of societal norms, there’s not much else for audiences to feast on…