I am of two minds when considering the career of Luca Guadagnino. On the one hand, I think he’s one of the most expressive and interesting filmmakers working today. There was a good reason that Call Me By Your Name (2017) became an immediate favorite as it turned a summer vacation full of sightseeing into the most beautifully nostalgic movie of the past decade. You could sense the passion in every frame and it was matched by performances that conveyed the complexities that came with your first love. It’s there in other benchmark films like I Am Love (2010) and A Bigger Splash (2015) that find him playing with the technique in peculiar manners.
Then there’s the trajectory that he’s been on as of late and one that Bones and All (2022) was never going to be far removed from. For as much as he poured his heart into every frame of Suspiria (2018), I can’t say that it was always worth it. Was it ambitious? Without a doubt. Reimagining the Dario Argento masterpiece through your own lens and having it be mostly successful is an achievement that makes me admire Guadagnino, but only a little bit. I’m not a fan of his more violent work, where he delves into horror through psychosexual manners that may be just as radiant as his romantic dramas but feel unpleasant and not fully realized. Again, Suspiria isn’t an awful film, but it’s the type that made me cautious about his descent into madness.
Even then, Bones and All was a welcomed surprise. It combined the best of both schools and presented them with the greatest thesis of why we love sex and violence so much. Sex is creation and violence is destruction. To be human is to exist within the center of these two poles, doing our best to not let one side take root too much. Even then, they can blur together with intoxicating results. Marketed at the time as “a cannibal love story,” it was going to push the boundaries into a greater subconscious. What if our passion is what can ultimately kill the ones we love, ostracizing us from the greater society? It’s a doomed romance that outstrips most genre fare in part by being presented in near cinema verite levels of discomfort. You believe that Timothee Chalamet and Taylor Russell are driven by flesh. Even then, it helps to explain why they need each other.
Rarely have I seen a film that depicts loneliness so perfectly. Outside of someone like Chantal Akerman, it’s rare for a horror film to connect with me on such a personal level that I feel the ache of the characters. I’m not talking about the ache of skin being ripped off the bone. I’m talking about how they observe the world, trying to find happiness but only finding cruelty and rejection. They are “freaks” as it were. Who would want to be around somebody that’s likely to leave their corpse a mangled feast? It’s to Guadagnino’s credit that he makes this all rational, managing to feel like a sympathetic trait. By the end, you want to believe this young couple will break free of their limitations and find something greater.
But the road there isn’t that simple. The story starts with the painful revelation that Maren (Russell) is to be disowned by her father (Andre Holland) and forced to wander the American Midwest looking for anything to call home. Initial wandering causes her to meet Sully (Mark Rylance), another “Eater” who is older and a bit dazed by his behavior. In what is one of Rylance’s best modern roles, he turns the droll misery into a misleading call for sympathy. Even as he’s showing the levels of his behavior through a hair rope, there’s the sense that he’s a cautionary tale. In a more naïve story, he is the mentor. In this one, he is the fear that even Eaters recognize. To be Sully is to risk growing old and being alone, passing time until feeding time.
Maren at least has a life she wants to live. She hasn’t been that removed from society for long. While she opens the film by giving into her worst impulses by biting off a friend’s finger, she comes to regret the action, realizing how difficult it would be for anyone to trust her again. She is just an average teenager otherwise. She needs someone to validate her. That’s where Lee (Chalamet) comes in. Together they search for Maren’s mother, whose own fate is a complicated affair that is best left to the viewer’s discovery.
There is so much pain in this story because of how well it captures a sense of nothingness. While I haven’t spent much time in the Midwest, there’s the common depiction of empty fields and people who can’t wait to move away. Youth is absent. Economies are tanking. Drug addiction is on the rise. In a broader interpretation, it could even symbolize a Midwest conservative view of homosexuality and how people are meant to feel uncomfortable in their own bodies for being different. None of these things are explicitly the central piece of the text, and yet they all work to build an understanding of why Maren feels stuck. She can’t go anywhere without being reminded of the reductive nature of her environment. She is judged. She can’t see a future. Everyone is self-involved in their own plight to the point that they lose any sense of optimism.
I think that when paired with the Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross score, it becomes something even greater. This is a Midwest story, but the score is not pulling from a familiar twang. The central guitar motif may sound like a hook, but it’s wispy to the point it sounds like it’s being carried on the wind prematurely. The rise of notes suggests happiness that’s being choked off before it can be formed into anything greater. While other motifs are more electronic-driven or capture sinister melodies, the central guitar is impressive with how it manages to sound like it’s peeking through a field of tall grass, smiling at you while holding onto its mystery. It’s never fully present and yet you long to hear it more formed.
This isn’t too far off from how Maren and Lee see their relationship. Together, they have some chance of happiness. Guadagnino does a great job of allowing the dead space in the scenery to be just as expressive as the actors. They aren’t offered an easy escape. Sully may be lurking in the background somewhere. Somebody who wants to hurt Maren may have reported her to the police already. Everything feels dangerous, and yet there’s a comfort when they are together. They meander, taking in conversations over 80s rock music and contemplating their next step. Whereas most coming of age films use the trope of jumping town advantageously, it feels like that is the only way this story could evolve into something greater.
I’m also charmed by how well the story uses intimate conversations. With the central mystery of who Maren’s mother is dragging on a certain anguish inside her, she is forced to find out from secondhand sources what her reputation is. Slowly it becomes clear that there’s a lot of pain in everyone. They each carry their own gripes, some tangential to the central action, and Guadagnino allows you to feel the pain through the slight dips in conversation. As they turn away or lower their voice, he allows you to understand that disappointment lingers. Maybe they too wanted to leave town and just never could. They’ve all become outcasts. Cannibalism may be a worse thing to be, but from the way it’s framed, there are many other ways that one can feel hollow inside than by murder.
That is how perfectly the pain is depicted. Guadagnino may be sparing with the graphic detail, but it’s still there. More than the blood pouring out, he forces the viewer to linger in the headspace of the characters. Their actions hold a greater weight and suddenly the thought of death is an explicit and implicit one. Everyone feels cannibalized by something in the Midwest, and some have been mutated in the process. At worst, you end up like Sully without a friend to turn to. If you’re fortunate, you may be able to find community and at least stand a chance to fend for yourself. Even then, the efforts to survive are difficult. Even if it’s against Eaters, there’s the reality of living with the guilt that nobody will respect you, maybe even love you. Without that, what’s the point of being alive?
Many have attempted to contemporize the teenage drama into something greater. While there are many good cases to be had, I think Bones and All deserves some consideration. It’s the type of work that relies on familiar genre concepts and finds the anguish inside. Metaphorically, each character is having something eat at them the entire film, and it’s a loneliness that is unbearable at times. There is a push to have it disappear, and it’s what the relationship between Maren and Lee symbolizes. It may not be one built to last, but you can’t help but believe that this will be the one that sticks. For a film that’s fairly nihilistic elsewhere, the effort to find a shining light in the darkness is its magnificent centerpiece.
I think this is one of Guadagnino’s best films. It understands the duality of sex and violence better than most of his films. It understands why we need love and how it can serve us in the face of destruction. As a metaphor for a larger societal struggle, it manages to be the only thing that these characters can hold onto. As the score plays over these scenes, there’s the melancholy of the unknown. As the scenery around them suggests, there’s nothing to protect them. They have to be their own protectors, and that’s scary in a world without parental guardians. There’s nothing stopping them from adventuring into the great unknown. The issue is that they might not like what they find there. As far as recent films go, there are few that I think perfectly captures the vibe of this uncertainty quite like Guadagnino’s latest little gem.
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