Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bones and All’ on Paramount+, a Gory Horror-Romance Starring Timothee Chalamet as a Dreamboat Cannibal

With Bones and All (now streaming on Paramount+, in addition to VOD streaming services like Amazon Prime Video), filmmaker Luca Guadagnino kind of smushes together the stuff of his two previous directorial outings: the juicy, sensual romance Call Me by Your Name and the juicy, sensual blood and guts of his 2018 reimagining of Dario Argento’s horror classic Suspiria. (Has Guadagnino not made a film that’s juicy and sensual? Pretty much no.) And so what we have here is a juicy, sensual road-trip romance between two young, attractive cannibals played by Taylor Russell (Waves, the Escape Rooms) and Timothee Chalamet (Call Me by Your Name, Dune, all your sadboi fantasies). Intrigued to see if Guadagnino can merge genres into some form of bloody art – and if I can make it through this review without making any cannibal puns? Me too.

BONES AND ALL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: High school: It’s shit, whether you’re a cannibal or not. Maren (Russell) happens to be a cannibal, which complicates things. We don’t know it at first – we just think her father Leonard (Andre Holland) is strict and overprotective, but once Maren nearly bites off a schoolmate’s finger during a fit of uncontrollable hunger, you’ve figured out that he’s not trying to protect his daughter from the evils of the world, but vice versa. It’s a strange moment – for a minute, Maren wears a lusty expression indicating that she might kiss the girl, but no, apparently she looked and smelled delicious, so, chompy chomp. Once Maren comes home with blood dripping from her chin and deep-staining her clothes, they immediately up and get out of there. From the looks of things, they’ve done this before. And Leonard has had enough. He loves Maren but he can’t do this any more. She wakes one morning to find an envelope with money and her birth certificate in it, and a cassette on which he dictated a farewell along with everything he knows about her affliction.

Where’s Maren’s mother, you might ask? That’s the thing. Leonard refused to speak of her. It appears cannibalism is a genetic condition, passed from parent to child. Curious and seeking answers, Maren decides to track down her mother, which requires a lengthy bus trip. Her first transfer is in Ohio, and just as she’s about to spend the night on a bus-stop bench, on odd gentleman approaches her, and please note, when I say “odd gentleman,” I use weapons-grade understatement. He’s Sully (Mark Rylance), and he smelled Maren. Eaters, you see – yes, “eaters” – can smell each other, something Maren has yet to learn. Sully will teach her a few things, e.g., how a human being’s scent changes the moment they die, or how not to act among the denizens of civilized society, especially if your demeanor makes Hannibal Lecter look like Mr. Rogers.

So Maren shares a meal – and no, it’s not Chinese takeout or a nice casserole – with Sully before moving on down the road a stretch or three, where she meets Lee (Chalamet), who smells like he eats people and looks like he was modeled after the carny’s son in that Simpsons episode where the operator of a rigged ring-toss game cons Homer out of the family home. There’s an incident with a scuzzbucket of a man that results in Lee emerging from a secluded locale with blood all over his chin and cheeks and hands and chest, confirming Maren’s suspicion that they’re of the same ilk. LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. Not that it emerges so quickly, their romance. It settles in during sweet, tender moments in which they share their hearts, moments that occur in-between gruesome murder-feedings and the scene in which Michael Stuhlbarg turns up to give the “bones and all” speech. Is this type of relationship sustainable? NO SPOILERS ON THE MENU.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is so visually poetic, it’s like Terrence Malick’s Green Inferno – although it draws on Badlands more than Ravenous. Also, in terms of tone and artsy-fartsiness, think Let the Right One In and Only Lovers Left Alive.

Performance Worth Watching: STUHLBARG: Filthy, long hair, no shirt and overalls, crazy eyes, pulling on a can of Bud, delivering the invocation of the movie title.

Memorable Dialogue: Our protagonists really hit it off:

Maren: What was your first time like?

Lee: Was the babysitter.

Maren: Mine too!

Sex and Skin: Brief images of porn magazines in the background.

Our Take: I feel like there’s a metaphor struggling to emerge or be crystallized within Bones and All, but it never fully manifests. Is it a promulgation on the remarkable ability of love, stone blind as ever, to persevere amidst great horror? Should we ruminate on the irony that our protagonists are drawn together to potentially propagate further death via their corrupt congenital material? Both Lee and Maren inherited their affliction from a parent, so any product of their love would be doomed to live on the most abominable fringes of society. What fresh hell of a world would produce a subspecies so bent on self-destruction? Is Maren’s inability to control her sociopathy despite her guilt analogous to individuals struggling to manage mental illness?

I pondered all this stuff. I had time – this is a 131-minute film that’s in no hurry to reach its conclusion. A conclusion that, I might add, is so rich with poetic irony, one is tempted to assert that the entirety of the movie exists to deliver it. And it’s reasonably effective, although Guadagnino leaves his wildly talented cast to splash around in the shallow end: Russell and Chalamet are lovely in their road-worn grime, in all the golden or shadowy natural light, in an amusing scene in which they make out on a carnival ferris wheel while Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” murmurs ominously on the soundtrack. (Notably, there’s an even funnier scene invoking the anti-majesty of Kiss’ “Lick it Up.”)

Visually, the film is frequently gorgeous, gritty and detailed in its compositions; at times, it flirts with being dreamy and hypnotic, but never fully commits to the aesthetic. If it had, Guadagnino’s sudden and intense incidents of lurid violence would rattle us with extreme tonal shifts, but instead, they’re merely memorably putrid displays of fetishy gore – complete with gut-churning mastication and slurping sounds, redlined on the audio track – of the type that the it’s-about-the-kills-man horror-maven crowd would find rather satisfying, assuming they have the stomach to sit through all the slow, artsy stuff, and the scenes of Chalamet crying. There is a great moment in which Maren pulls the tape out of a cassette – you know, “disemboweling” it – a bit of foreshadowing with one hell of an eye-widening payoff. But any hope that Guadagnino would at least traffic in wholesale provocation is diluted by the film’s dramatic inertness. It’s not quite enough that Bones and All only occasionally shakes us from the ass-groove in the couch.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Bones and All comes tantalizingly close to being an effective arterial-spray gothic romance, but it too often feels like an empty exercise in style.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.