Bones and All Review: Luca Guadagnino’s Bumbling Horror Mish-Mash

The beguiling opening scenes of Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All recall his warm, wonderful queer romance Call Me By Your Name. We’re in a small American town in the 1980s. High-schooler Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell) is a model of endearing awkwardness, clearly wanting to come out of her shell but just needing a little push. When one of Maren’s classmates invites her to a sleepover, it’s the perfect opportunity to face her adolescent fears.

There are a few things that feel off, though, such as how Maren treads a little too uncomfortably into her friend’s space, or the moment, later that evening, when Maren’s father, Frank (André Holland), latches the door of her bedroom as if locking in a wild animal. The bewitching atmosphere truly shifts when Maren sneaks out to the sleepover. Her stealthiness is a tad too purposeful, more instinctive than rebellious. When she gets to her friend’s house, there’s an erotic undercurrent to how the girls interact, a sprightly and naïve sensuality that Guadagnino excels at portraying, though the juvenile longings feel somehow hungrier than normal. It’s not surprising, then, when Maren puts her friend’s finger in her mouth and devours it to the bone.

Maren is an “eater,” a normal person in all respects…except for her hankering for human flesh. For much of her life, she and her father have been itinerant, since there’s no telling when her ravenous urges may emerge. Initially, it seems like we’re in for a Let the Right One In-style tale of a parent shuttling their monstrous yet still beloved child to the next American backwater, where they can both start anew. But Frank is out of the picture quickly; as he explains in a cassette recording, the burden of Maren’s appetites is too much for him to bear. He leaves her some money and her birth certificate so that she can strike out on her own and find her long-absent mother, from whom she appears to have inherited her cravings.

Adapted from Camille DeAngelis’s 2015 novel by Guadagnino’s frequent collaborator David Kajganich (he also penned A Bigger Splash and Suspiria), Bones and All mirrors the callow volatility of its protagonist. It’s at times a lyrical coming-of-age story, at others a picturesque road movie (the grainy, sun-flecked cinematography by Arseni Khachaturan is often lovely). And in other moments it’s an overwrought horror flick with bumbling sociopolitical pretentions. (A certain election-denying former New York mayor makes a cameo in archival footage.)

Maren’s lengthy first meeting with a fellow eater, the wolfish Sully (Mark Rylance), plays like an absurdist chamber drama (call it Waiting to Consume Godot), while her frequent adventures with the closer-to-her-own-age bad boy cannibal Lee (Timothée Chalamet) are teen-lit emo-romanticism with much more graphic bloodletting. It’s all a strange and not-very-effective brew, nowhere near as evocative a portrait of adolescent angst—actual and metaphorical—as Guadagnino’s underrated television miniseries We Are Who We Are.

Neither Russell nor the punk-garbed Chalamet do much beyond speaking gently and posing attractively, even when covered head to toe in arterial spray. Though the latter does show flashes of the magnetic swagger he displayed in Call Me By Your Name, as when he shakes and shimmies, post-repast, to KISS’s “Lick It Up.” Both performers are sadly at a disadvantage given how many of the older actors gnaw at the scenery like it’s a still-warm cadaver.

Take Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays an absurdly yokelish anthropophagite who seems like he stepped out of the survival horror video game Resident Evil: Biohazard. His character is accompanied by a bumpkin groupie played by, of all people, filmmaker David Gordon Green, which pushes the Evil Redneck meter of their scene together further into the risibly red.

Elsewhere, an eye-darting Chloë Sevigny pops up sans meat hooks for a crucial sequence that sadly falls emotionally flat, while Jessica Harper, as an older suburbanite with a secret connection to Maren, ludicrously wigs out from behind her grotesquely frumpy period wardrobe. Rylance is the prime offender, though, hammily acting the predator with his extravagant attire straight out of a Grimm’s fairy tale and a tic-laden lisp best described as “creepy children’s show host.” His many shameless self-indulgences help to make a regrettable hash of a climax that aims for, and goes far wide of, Grand Guignol bittersweetness. Straining to be a YA spin on Trouble Every Day, Bones and All barely eclipses Twilight.