Post by Dracula on Dec 7, 2022 11:07:12 GMT -5
Bones and All(11/28/2022)
I must say, when I watched I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me By Your Name I can’t say that “spends the next five years making a pair of gory horror-ish movies” seemed like the most likely next step for their director Luca Guadagnino, but here we are. His new movie Bones and All is basically a riff on the vampire movie except rather than just drinking blood its characters are basically doomed to eat human flesh. Beyond that they don’t really have any of the powers or the weaknesses of vampires except for the ability to “smell” other “eaters” like themselves, but like vampires they have the same “eat others or die” predicament. Our main character is a teenager played by Taylor Russell whose father has been moving her around and evading authorities after some “incidents” she caused but early in the film the father basically has to abandon her to fend for herself. She then embarks on a road trip across America to find her mother (who also appears to have been an “eater”) and along the way meats some other “eaters” including one played by Timothée Chalamet.
So, we’ve got a movie from the director of Call Me By Your Name in which we see a sub-culture of people who are born inclined to do something society views as deviant which they don’t discover until their teen years but may have known about earlier and which often results in them being drifters shunned by their parents and which much of society is kind of oblivious to but which they can sense and intuit in others when they see them… maybe I’m reading too much into this but I’m thinking there might be some queer subtext here. If there is, it’s perhaps of a rather regressive nature as this is less a queerness of empowered pride and more of a queerness of self-loathing and perpetual outsider status, and as with a lot of horror allegories for queerness the message gets a bit unsavory given that literal cannibals are actually hurting people in a way that the average gay person does not. Also, all of that is subtext, in terms of the film’s literal story it is essentially a Badlands style “lovers on the run” story with the Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet characters, albeit one that feels a bit more complicated and doomed from the start mixed in with this fictional sub-culture that reminded me a bit of the “cult of psychics” sub-plot of the Stephen King adaptation Doctor Sleep.
The film is also something of a road trip movie, one that has that “America through the eyes of a foreign director” feel to it, a bit reminiscent of American Honey given that and the fact that this is focusing on teenagers/young adults going on a road trip. So, there’s a lot going on here and a lot to recommend, but I can’t say that I love everything about it. For one, I’m just not sure that the central cannibalism concept is entirely a winner. If you’re going to essentially invent a new form of vampire-esque monster I feel like you could come up with something that has a bit more going on with them. I’d also say that while Taylor Russell does have something of a screen presence to her I’m not sure her acting is entirely what it needs to be here and she struggles at certain points in the film. Beyond that, I don’t know, at its heart I think this is a bit more formulaic than the transgressive concept and stylish flourishes would have you believe, but those flourishes do go a long way. I’m not exactly sure who this movie is for. It’s too gory for many audiences but despite that it’s not really a horror movie at all and basically makes no attempt to really scare the viewer, so this is going to have a tough time finding an audience, but it’s an interesting stew of genre concepts and sensibilities that’s certainly worth a look.
***1/2 out of Five
I must say, when I watched I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me By Your Name I can’t say that “spends the next five years making a pair of gory horror-ish movies” seemed like the most likely next step for their director Luca Guadagnino, but here we are. His new movie Bones and All is basically a riff on the vampire movie except rather than just drinking blood its characters are basically doomed to eat human flesh. Beyond that they don’t really have any of the powers or the weaknesses of vampires except for the ability to “smell” other “eaters” like themselves, but like vampires they have the same “eat others or die” predicament. Our main character is a teenager played by Taylor Russell whose father has been moving her around and evading authorities after some “incidents” she caused but early in the film the father basically has to abandon her to fend for herself. She then embarks on a road trip across America to find her mother (who also appears to have been an “eater”) and along the way meats some other “eaters” including one played by Timothée Chalamet.
So, we’ve got a movie from the director of Call Me By Your Name in which we see a sub-culture of people who are born inclined to do something society views as deviant which they don’t discover until their teen years but may have known about earlier and which often results in them being drifters shunned by their parents and which much of society is kind of oblivious to but which they can sense and intuit in others when they see them… maybe I’m reading too much into this but I’m thinking there might be some queer subtext here. If there is, it’s perhaps of a rather regressive nature as this is less a queerness of empowered pride and more of a queerness of self-loathing and perpetual outsider status, and as with a lot of horror allegories for queerness the message gets a bit unsavory given that literal cannibals are actually hurting people in a way that the average gay person does not. Also, all of that is subtext, in terms of the film’s literal story it is essentially a Badlands style “lovers on the run” story with the Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet characters, albeit one that feels a bit more complicated and doomed from the start mixed in with this fictional sub-culture that reminded me a bit of the “cult of psychics” sub-plot of the Stephen King adaptation Doctor Sleep.
The film is also something of a road trip movie, one that has that “America through the eyes of a foreign director” feel to it, a bit reminiscent of American Honey given that and the fact that this is focusing on teenagers/young adults going on a road trip. So, there’s a lot going on here and a lot to recommend, but I can’t say that I love everything about it. For one, I’m just not sure that the central cannibalism concept is entirely a winner. If you’re going to essentially invent a new form of vampire-esque monster I feel like you could come up with something that has a bit more going on with them. I’d also say that while Taylor Russell does have something of a screen presence to her I’m not sure her acting is entirely what it needs to be here and she struggles at certain points in the film. Beyond that, I don’t know, at its heart I think this is a bit more formulaic than the transgressive concept and stylish flourishes would have you believe, but those flourishes do go a long way. I’m not exactly sure who this movie is for. It’s too gory for many audiences but despite that it’s not really a horror movie at all and basically makes no attempt to really scare the viewer, so this is going to have a tough time finding an audience, but it’s an interesting stew of genre concepts and sensibilities that’s certainly worth a look.
***1/2 out of Five
