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MAREN (Taylor Russell) is an 18-year-old high school student who constantly feels out of place from leading mysterious, itinerant lives with her father, travelling from one town to the next.
She yearns for a deeper connection, and so jumps at the opportunity when invited to a slumber party by her new classmates. Her room door, which was always padlocked, hints at the sinister turn of events that was about to unfold.
Maren sneaks out of her house to join the party. Seized in a daze of euphoria, she chews off someone’s finger, savouring it like a predator cat with its prey.
She rushes home in a panic, and later awakes to find that her father has left her, in a new town, with only some cash, her birth certificate and a cassette tape to fend with.
The cassette tape reveals the reason for the locked doors and nomadic lifestyle: Maren is a cannibal, a result of a genetically inherited disorder that requires her to feast on human flesh for survival.
She sets out on a road trip to find her mother, the only other person who could give her the answers she was looking for. In her journey, she meets a coterie of individuals suffering from the same affliction.
Two such characters which take up a bulk of the runtime are Sully (Mark Rylance), an older man who has learnt to live with the condition, and Lee (Timothee Chalamet), who becomes Maren’s love interest.
Through Maren, Guadagnino and writer David Kajganich peek into the lives of strangers with a deep sense of curiosity and admiration, never placing moral judgement however bizarre or eccentric.
‘Bones and All’ soars in these moments, imbuing Maren’s journey across the vast Americana a Malickian spirituality.
Yet, these very instances also mark Guadagnino’s biggest missteps as Maren neither matures nor develops a stronger sense of identity through her encounters along the way, remaining a stagnant voice within her own story.
As a result, the movie is crushed under its own weight of superficiality. In all other respects, Guadagnino hits top marks. Arseni Khachaturan’s imagery spectacularly captures the hazy, dreamlike reverie of American landscapes at the height of the Reagan administration.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross provide subtle, understated music through solitary acoustic guitar riffs that heighten the loneliness, melancholia and isolation of its characters.
Taylor Russell and Timothee Chalamet, despite their young career, give performances equal to the most trained of actors, never faltering despite sharing the frame with the likes of Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg or Chloe Sevigny. – The Vibes, November 27, 2022
Bones and All is playing in cinemas nationwide
