Grade: A
Bones and All is a cinematic cocktail mixed from several eclectic sources. I might describe it as like Twilight and Let the Right One In, but with cannibals instead of vampires. The road-tripping murderers motif made me think of Natural Born Killers. However, it has a wistful, reflective indie-film vibe akin to Nomadland, Tumbleweeds, and Easy Rider. Debating between two grades, I settled on the higher one, but not without hesitation. Bones and All is one of the best movies of the year, regardless, and this review would be the same no matter what letter was at the bottom.
Director Luca Guadagnino also did Call Me By Your Name, one of the top Oscar contenders of 2018. I liked it, but not as much as most. I found it quite bottom-heavy. The frustrating first half was a whole lot of nothing but a whole lot of teasing, and then halfway through, it was like someone finally touched the gas pedal – and I could understand what everyone was going on about. Michael Stuhlbarg gave one of my favorite performances not nominated for an Oscar. With Bones and All, Guadagnino has distributed the action and arc more evenly, and it reunites him with Stuhlbarg and his Call Me By Your Name star Timothée Chalamet.
But our star here is Taylor Russell (Words On Bathroom Walls). She plays Maren, who lives with her dad. The mother is out of the picture. While at a sleepover at a classmate’s house, she can’t help herself and chomps on a friend’s finger. While she screams bloody murder and pulls out her mangled, flayed finger, Maren runs back home – soaked with blood on her clothes and around her mouth. Her dad tells her to pack as much as she can and meet him in the car in 3 minutes. He knows the drill. In the next town, he abandons her, leaving only an envelope with money, her birth certificate, and a Walkman with a message he recorded on a cassette tape.
“Eaters,” as they call themselves, can identify other eaters by smell. Most of them also have an unofficial, unspoken rule where they don’t eat others like them. While traveling through the country, Maren befriends Lee (Chalamet) – a fellow eater. Soon they are more than friends, and we, the viewers, are in their corner. Maren meets another eater she is not as comfortable with: Sully, played by Mark Rylance in a performance that is a ticking, spinning game show wheel of terrifying, reassuring, funny, and sometimes all of the above.
In the eating scenes, the sounds are worse than anything Guadagnino shows us (though the movie has its fair share of disturbing images). Sometimes I forgot it was about cannibals; it could have played as a pensive character study about two lost, tortured souls who have found each other, without the “eater” angle. That’s a genre I enjoy, plus I can always appreciate being good and creeped out. Bones and All scratches many itches. Wait’ll you see the last scene, which manages to be simultaneously horrifying and bittersweetly beautiful. Watch the expression of pleasure and pain.
Grade: A
Film Reviews by Mark 
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