Luca Guadagnino’s “Bones and All”: Love Will Tear Us Apart
As soon as I heard that Luca Guadagnino was working on a new film starring Timothee Chalamet again, I basically started foaming at the mouth. I will watch anything either of them create, and Guadagnino’s now-released “Bones and All” was no exception. Upon returning home for Thanksgiving break, I sat myself in a theatre with a few of my friends to see it, praying to have my world rocked again.
I was not let down, and this film is now not only meaningful to me, but to many of my friends who have seen it. It is devastating. The film sort of received a reputation online for being disgusting and bloody, and while in some ways it very much is, I think that notion is misleading. Guadagnino’s coming-of-age stories are crafted primarily with love, tenderness, and a pervasive sense of melancholy—as exemplified by his recent series “We Are Who We Are” and 2017 masterpiece “Call Me by Your Name.” His films evoke faded memories, first loves, and tragedies so consuming they leave only stillness. He doesn’t relish suffering and is able to balance realism and fantasy masterfully. His primary intention here is not to scare or repulse, but to deliver a beautiful metaphor for coming-of-age with compassion and inherent tragedy. While the film does have some especially queasy moments, I wouldn’t classify it primarily as a horror film in any way. The film’s focus is on the characters and how their lives intertwine, with the trait that brings them together happening to be cannibalism.
The film is set in 1988 Virginia, where teenager Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell) lives with her father as a stereotypical 80s teen—sneaking out to sleepovers, talking about boys, and severing girls’ fingers with her teeth. Maren is afflicted by the pervasive need to “feed,” with these cannibalistic tendencies being the result of some sort of genetic disease (it is not explained in detail, and it doesn’t need to be). When Maren’s father learns about his daughter’s most recent bought of cannibalism, he quickly relocates them to Maryland, where shortly after Maren’s eighteenth birthday, he abandons her. He leaves her three items: some money, her birth certificate, and a cassette of himself recounting the story of Maren’s first cannibalistic attack when she was three years old. He explains that throughout the years, upon witnessing more and more of Maren’s episodes, he struggled over her apparent lack of remorse, ending the tape with a wish that she would someday overcome her predisposition to eating flesh.
From then on, the film becomes a road trip movie, with Maren seeking out her estranged mother in Minnesota. During her travels, she meets Lee (Timothee Chalamet), another teenage drifter suffering in the same way. Together, on a cross-country road trip, the two meet other cannibals and fall in love. Under the purple skies and warm countryside, the two’s romance doesn’t seem jarring, despite them eating people the rest of the time. The score is beautiful, and the Van Sant-esq editing feels dreamlike, even when the film’s tension reaches its boiling point and the genre slips further into horror.
The film is driven mostly by the two’s relationship, as they navigate and come to terms with their condition and how it affects who they love. Both of their pasts come back to haunt them, and they are forced to reckon with the moral implications of their actions. The metaphor of cannibalism for coming of age and first love is fantastic and emotional, and their romance is in fact all-devouring. I truly loved this film, and if you can handle its graphic violence and disturbing scenes, you are in for a moving coming of age story you can’t look away from. If you just get it like I do, you’ll probably come away thinking that eating someone whole is the purest form of love.