'Bones and All' - my personal love story with Guadagnino's perfectly balanced amalgamation of romance and horror.
(Spoilers Ahead)
The first time I sat down and watched ‘Bones and All’ it was in my old flat with a bunch of friends. Speaking over dialogue, drinking tea, paying attention mainly when the film veered into gore and blood and spittle. By the end I didn’t feel affected by it, left disappointed due to my deep adoration for his earlier film ‘Call Me By Your Name’ (2017). My review - the ideas seemed undercooked (mind the pun and the onslaught to come) and that it didn’t incur half of the same yearning and heartache that his predicating film had invoked in me. However, months later I stumbled upon an interview with the director Luca Guadagnino and was compelled to watch the film again, to look for the beauty I had missed on my first viewing.
Initially, the horror and gore, alienated me due to my squeamishness. Unlike the classic love tales of vampiric love coming from the likes of the commercial teen hit series ‘Twilight’ (2008) with merely their hunger for blood, it is the humanness of cannibals and Guadagnino’s visceral and gruesomely sensual ‘eating’ that makes it so difficult to swallow. For some audiences, the concept will be enough to make their stomach turn and the scenes of tearing flesh and blood soaked full bellies might lead them to turn it off entirely. Yet, if you persevere when stripping these elements back to get to the very bones of the film, a metaphor emanates of the maddening effect the characters are victim to and the film opens up in ways that left me awestruck.
‘Bones and All’ is a complex, ambitious and therefore, ambiguous metaphor which is what makes it so universal. The cannibalistic disorder of the Eaters present in the film could be a personification for so many human struggles, whether that be addiction, queerness, childhood trauma, homelessness, abandonment or simply the feeling or experience of being othered. How it feels to run away from who you are but never being able to quite escape? How it feels to be on the outside, looking in? To be an outcast, an outlaw? To live with a shame that eats you from the inside out? These were all the questions the narrative repeated to me over and over as the fable-like tale unspooled before my eyes.
Two beautiful creatures emerge from the vast, barren landscape of Midwestern America, Maren and Lee (Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet). Star-crossed lovers, both with bloody pasts they aren’t ready to explain to each other, nor to themselves. At first, they’re simply two people who both need to get somewhere, anywhere, as long as it is a long, long way from where they came from. But soon, romance is inevitable as for the first time for both of these characters, they see each other as they truly are. And more than that, aren’t terrified of the part of each other they are still too afraid to accept in themselves.
The unconventional couple face moral dilemmas, emotional turbulence and Maren meeting her Eater mother for the first time. Despite it all, they keep tumbling back together, for no one else, including even the audience, can understand. In their harsh yet strikingly beautiful landscape, they admit truths to each other they had never dared to speak aloud. Guadagnino utilises the wide open spaces that have been ravaged by an opioid crisis, inhospitality towards queer people, inherited family trauma, a crisis of broken homes and political ideological rot, as a further framework for the metaphor of cannibalism. In this violent setting, Lee’s secrecy of who he is and where he came from, is clearly as a method to protect himself. Initially physically but ultimately, emotionally as he confesses his past to Maren, exposing his vulnerabilities and risking being truly seen and judged by another. Amongst all of the undeniable horror and nauseating acts the leads commit, I couldn’t help empathise with these young individuals who were destined to stand apart from the rest of society.
The script, characters, symbolism and cinematography were all handled with such compassion. However, tragically Guadagnino is concentrated on the realism and doesn’t let our two outsiders live happily ever after, even once they do control their urges and try and live a somewhat normal existence like “people do”. A disturbingly creepy figure from Maren’s past, Sully (played superbly by the legend, Mark Rylance) reappears with every intention to hurt the pair in whatever gruesome way he is so drawn to. A struggle of bloodshed, leaves Sully dead and Lee mortally injured. There is no way out, he is worsening fast and the murdered murderer lies in the next room. Their first home, is now stained with blood and they have nowhere and no-one to turn to.
The film concludes with Lee begging Maren to eat him, bones and all. This process of eating the totality of another human being, not only earns the title of the film but is also described by another Eater (Micheal Stuhlbarg) as the height of euphoric experiences, the greatest high anyone could ever experience, the point of no return. This transformative moment, a possible metaphor for first love, when we first allow our souls and our bodies to be utterly consumed by another. Is this the greatest act of love, is it the easiest thing to do? This question is left ricocheting out of control as the film comes to its closing credits, with the final scene returning back to that same hilltop where they first made a home in each other and now where they hold each other, naked and bare. A place they can still run to? Is Lee now a part of her, that she holds on to, that she can keep inside, forever changed by loving him and him loving her?
Bones and All (2022) marries romance and horror in a way so tender, so exacting in its beauty that it is no surprise that it comes from the same auteur of ‘Call Me By Your Name’. Guadagnino’s earlier 2017 film is so beautiful in every sense that it’s almost painful, laced with yearning and heartache, a metaphor perhaps for the duplicitous nature of life. Despite struggling with the more gory elements, it is these moments which demand the audience to ask themselves, do you judge them too? With a concept that is bound to induce fearfulness, using such an extreme means that every audience member can understand the sense of shame and self-hatred it would inflict whilst simultaneously, mirroring the fear society has of those who appear different. And although not to this degree, the idea of having something you want to hide from the world, something you are afraid will ruin you, something that feels ugly and dangerous and spinning out of control, is a very human one. Or at least for anyone who has ever felt like an outsider.
A masterpiece.
