‘Bones and All’ review: The next great queer horror movie has arrived

Timothée Chalamet is again to complicate your crush on him. 

The It Boy who has awed critics and seduced followers together with his riveting turns in Name Me By Your Identify, Ladybird, and Little Girls takes “dangerous boy” to a complete new degree together with his efficiency as a cannibal in Bones and All. On its floor, the highway journey film about teen runaways on a homicide spree appears to comply with within the custom of Badlands or Pure Born Killers. However within the palms of director Luca Guadagnino (Suspiria, Name Me By Your Identify), this audacious adaption of Camille DeAngelis’s YA novel performs nearer to Interview with a Vampire, providing an intoxicating story of queer love and self-discovery that is dripping with blood. 

On this Name Me By Your Identify mini-reunion, Chalamet stars as a younger and alluring drifter named Lee who fatefully comes throughout the not too long ago disowned Maren (Taylor Russell), who’s on a wobbly quest to search out her long-lost mom. Shortly the pair understand they’re each “eaters,” basically cannibals who have been born to crave human flesh. Their meet-cute is something however, involving murder and the hasty resolution to crew up and take off — in a stolen truck, no much less. However from their first shared look, it is clear these two see one thing in one another that the remainder of the world misses. 

Collectively, Maren and Lee will hunt. They are going to seek for the reality about Maren’s lacking mother, and they’ll dodge the opposite eaters, whose wildness and weirdness are uniquely unsettling. However can a life consuming on the run convey them something however ache? 

Beneath its pores and skin, Bones and All is a queer love story. 

Sure, sure. Maren is a younger girl, and Lee is a younger man. Nonetheless, within the movie, Lee is introduced as sexually fluid in his wishes and is derided with a homosexual slur for the best way he clothes. Past this although, in Guadagnino’s adaptation of DeAngelis’s guide, cannibalism serves as a metaphor for queerness. 

Earlier than you blanch, take into account that queer need has throbbed on the coronary heart of horror movies since James Whale gave us Frankenstein, a story the place a person’s need to marry cannot examine to his need to construct the person of his desires. Is that enjoying a bit with the movie’s literal plot? Positive, however for many years rampant homophobia in America has compelled Hollywood filmmakers into the closets of queer coding, from the mother-obsessed Psycho to the home partnership of the bloodsuckers in Interview a Vampire. These scary figures defied gender norms, discovered lasting bonds in same-sex relationships, and struggled with the horror of getting society deem them a monster. Bones and All carries on the custom with its coming-of-age story set within the Reagan period. 

Right here, sexual need is tied to cannibalism from a gap slumber occasion, the place flirtation swiftly escalates to a grotesque chew. In Lee, Maren sees somebody who understands and shares this need. Collectively, they discover this darkish impulse, pushed by the necessity to eat however terrified by what it may imply to search out somebody to share this life-style with. Like Interview with the Vampire, the people-devouring scenes have a component of sensuality to them. Characters shed their garments or come out of kill scenes with hair tousled. They pant and moan as they chew, claw, and dig into their victims. However not like Interview with the Vampire, Bones and All would not enable audiences to swoon with its eaters. 

Bones and All is very violent and never for the faint of abdomen. 

Keep in mind the meals porn pictures in Guadagnino’s I Am Love? Keep in mind the digital camera’s affected person capturing of each curve and element of a fragile dish? Now, think about that focus and fascination utilized to presenting a person’s nipple being bitten proper off his chest.

Bones and All would not maintain again in its use of gore, very like in Guadagnino’s grotesque remake of Suspiria. Even a hardened horror fan like myself was gasping in shock on the tearing of flesh and its consumption right here. Such grisly content material might sound out of stability with the in any other case dreamy tone of the movie, which cruises from state to state, month to month, in a fortunately hazy blur of lust and crime. Nonetheless, Guadagnino employs the repulsion at these scenes of cannibalism to replicate Maren’s self-hatred, born from being raised within the age of Ronald Reagan, the place preppy conformity was the rule of the day and homosexual males have been dying of AIDS earlier than an apathetic president. Her father taught her that her wishes have been evil and must be hidden, and so she did… till she could not. 

In searching for her mom, Maren finds a selected household in Lee. She additionally finds cautionary tales, like a wild-grinned redneck (Name Me By Your Identify’s Michael Stuhlbarg in a hair-raising efficiency) and an eccentric outdated loner (Mark Rylance, who’s winsome and terrifying in flip). However as she begins to search out confidence in who she is and what she loves, the depictions of violence change. Her closing kill is not any much less bloody than her first however is shot in a manner that just about mimics a love scene, specializing in connection over destruction. In doing so, Guadagnino creates an arc of Maren’s maturity by self-love (and sure, fictional cannibalism). 

Timothée Chalamet and Mark Rylance are awe-striking in Bones and All. 

Credit score: Yannis Drakoulidis / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Footage

Chalamet is beautifully solid as Lee, a dream boy who might be a nightmare. His wiry body, mop of sloppily dyed pink hair, and array of tattered floral tops performs just like the thrift store model of Leonardo DiCaprio in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Actually, Lee is the poor man’s Leo, boasting all of the attract however on a price range. 

Poverty is essential to understanding each lead lovers, who — like many LGBTQ youths — have been disowned or ostracized due to their wishes, and they also dwell on the streets, scraping by nonetheless they will. On this storm of disaster, Chalamet is calm and breezy to appease Maren’s final nerve. However he’s not numb, and his ache will are available in a climactic catharsis that’s as harrowing as it’s weirdly exhilarating. 

In sharp distinction to Lee is Sully, a would-be mentor who carries a gentle tone with an fringe of menace. Oscar-winner Rylance (Bridge of Spies) might be a contender for Finest Supporting actor, that’s if the Academy can abdomen his darkest scenes. The English actor with the mug of an adoring grandad walks a razor’s edge between endearing and unnerving. In a single sequence, you may want fiercely for Maren to comply with Sully, the quirky however protecting guncle. Within the subsequent, your pores and skin is likely to be coated in goosebumps as your complete physique wills you to flee, wishing you possibly can drag Maren with you. With a tough look or a gentle hiss, Rylance can do a 180 that’ll make your head spin and your backbone shudder. 

But for all this, Bones and All is Russell’s film. Her function is much from the showiest, made up of silent stares and cautious speech. However that is by design. Maren is a younger girl who has been pressured for therefore lengthy to restrict herself to a little bit field of what society says she must be that it takes her a lot of the film to creep out from behind the partitions she’s constructed. As her vulnerability blossoms, the stoney exterior steadily crumbles, giving us entry to her passions and ache. Russell’s restraint builds Maren’s journey slowly however certainly, standing as much as the unbelievable display presence of her heralded co-stars with out aiming to outshine them. Hers shouldn’t be a flashy function, however a sluggish burn that units hearth within the closing act, leaving the viewers flushed. 

Like I Am Love and Name Me By Your Identify earlier than it, Luca Guadagnino Bones and All is a romance that’s so intensely sensual that it lingers just like the contact of a lover’s contact in your lips even after they go away.

Together with his newest, he embraces physique horror to precise homophobic self-loathing brutally fostered by society in Reagan-era America. By casting a contemporary It Boy to reminisce about those that got here earlier than, he lures older audiences into a well-known rush of adolescent lust. By stacking his solid with dazzling younger expertise and established supporting gamers, Guadagnino brings a gradual stream of depth, whether or not a scene be about cannibalism or coupling up. They’re our unflinching guides by this world of spit, snot, and blood. And thru all this muck, mayhem, and homicide, the movie uncovers a deep empathy for queer youth determined to be understood and beloved.

Ultimately, Bones and All is as radiantly romantic as it’s unapologetically horrific. On this, it is not only a gem of queer horror however among the finest movies of 2022. 

Bones and All was reviewed out of the sixtieth New York Movie Competition. The film involves theaters Nov. 23.