‘Bones and All’ Review: An Uncomfortable Watch, Yet One of the Year’s Most Impactful Movies

Bones and All

Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet in MGM’s Bones and All

Bones and All is the latest film from Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino. It premiered in theaters worldwide in late November.

 

Every once in a while, I come across certain movies that look like they were tailor-made for my sensibilities. Christopher Nolan is directing a movie about Oppenheimer and the creation of the atomic bomb? Say no more. Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan play the New York Times journalists who ousted Harvey Weinstein in 2017? Please give me my ticket now. At the same time, there are also other stories that look like they were made for my other half, as they are so unbelievably out of my comfort zone that I would need a very good reason to watch them.

 

Bones and All is that kind of film, and the reunion of Luca Guadagnino and Timothée Chalamet was the reason I needed to make the jump. The film follows Taylor Russell’s Maren, an 18-year-old who has been left aside by her father after it’s become clear to him that she is just like her mother, someone who enjoys eating human flesh. An “eater”, as the other members of her kind prefer to call themselves — she starts meeting a bunch of them as she embarks on a 3,000-mile car trip across the United States to meet her birth mother. The first one she meets is Mark Rylance’s Sully, easily one of the creepiest characters of the entire year in film. But not all eaters are 60-year-old, disturbing killers; there are also some 20-year-old attractive killers out there, as Maren realizes when she meets Lee, played by Timothée Chalamet.

 

Bones and All

Taylor Russell (Maren) and Timothée Chalamet (Lee) in MGM’s Bones and All.

 

The two get on the road together, and the film becomes a road-trip adventure where both characters will uncover each other’s deepest secrets, desires, and fears. Bones and All deals with cannibalism, but as Guadagnino has explained, it’s not just about that. The film touches upon themes of deep personal regret, learning to live with our past mistakes, and trying to make a better tomorrow out of them; it’s a critique of social abandonment and a story about feeling lonely and left behind by everyone else. The tight script by David Kajganich deals masterfully with the themes of family and found family, of looking ourselves in the mirror to realize we can do better. We must shut our inner demons out and learn not to listen to the bad influences in our lives, and the past does not define us.

 

Unfortunately for someone like me, Guadagnino’s excellent direction also features some of the most grotesque sequences I’ve seen all year, and made Bones and All an uncomfortable watch throughout its runtime, many times. The film works best when it’s a character study of its leads, when Lee and Maren are just talking it out. But there are plenty of flesh-eating scenes that horror lovers will surely eat up and that someone like me, who can’t even stand needles, won’t enjoy. The sound design of those scenes has stayed with me ever since watching the movie a week ago.

 

Bones and All

Timothée Chalamet (Lee) and Taylor Russell (Maren) in MGM’s Bones and All.

 

While Chalamet may very well be the most talented working actor under 30, or even 40, the true standout of the film is Taylor Russell, with whom I was not familiar — she definitely stole my heart with her poignant, extraordinary performance. She owns the frame every second she’s in it — she’s the perfect POV for the audience, showing excellent levels of inexperience and naïveté, but also plenty of confidence and courage.

 

Arseni Khachaturan’s cinematography and Marco Costa’s sharp editing also enhanced the movie to a whole new level, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ music helped set the mood of the film without ever overpowering it. At the very center, there are two powerful performances by Chalamet and Russell, with Mark Rylance creeping in from the outside through arguably his best performance since 2015’s Bridge of Spies. And then, Luca Guadagnino’s direction is the glue that holds all of it together.

 

Bones and All is currently available on PVOD in certain markets, and in theaters in some international territories.