All you can eat

Outside, the fans scream for their spindly idol. Inside the Royal Festival Hall, we, the audience, wait for the preview of a movie that is meant to inspire screams of a very different sort. 

On stage, Timothée Chalamet, slender in a white Alexander McQueen suit, radiating the impermeable cool of a malnourished James Dean, barely raises an eyebrow in recognition of the applause. Five years ago, such scenes were all very new for the rising star. But now? It’s all in a day’s work for the 26-year-old.

In Bones and All (general release, 23 November), he is reunited with Luca Guadagnino, who directed his breakthrough movie, the Oscar-nominated Call Me by Your Name (2017). Both films are set in the 1980s and explore the intersection of passionate love and social taboo. And there, the similarities most definitely end.

Based on the 2015 YA thriller of the same name by Camille DeAngelis, Bones and All follows Maren (Taylor Russell, excellent), a clever, ill-at-ease teen starting at a new school, who lives in Virginia with her father Frank (André Holland). Invited to a sleepover, she seems to be fitting in with her classmates – until a moment of intimacy goes horribly wrong and she bites off a girl’s finger and starts to eat it.

In this single jump scare, Maren’s entire future is capsized. Her father abandons her, leaving only some cash and a cassette tape – which reveals that this compulsion has afflicted her since she was an infant when she would sink her teeth into unsuspecting babysitters. In search of answers and her mother Janelle (Chloë Sevigny), she buys a Greyhound bus ticket and leaves behind all pretense of rootedness or belonging.

It is on the road, drifting in Reagan’s America, that the newly itinerant Maren finds her tribe: the “eaters” who, like her, must feast on human flesh. Mark Rylance is superb as Sully, a middle-aged cannibal-nomad, who wears a feathered hat and is reading James Joyce’s Dubliners. Though he postures initially as Maren’s protector, his predatory character reveals itself soon enough – with a quiet menace that recalls Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter (1955).

Yet it is her encounter with Lee (Chalamet) in an Ohio grocery store that presents her instead with the possibility that what looks like a life of damnation may be compatible with the experience of true love. With his lanky dyed hair, pink printed shirt and ripped jeans, he exudes a feckless charisma by which Maren is fast smitten. “I don’t want to hurt anybody,” she tells him. “Famous last words,” he replies, with rueful candour.

The power of Bones and All lies in the convergence of three cinematic genres, artfully interwoven in David Kajganich’s screenplay. First, and most obviously, it pays homage to the Great American Road Movie: Lee and Maren naturally invoke Martin Sheen’s Kit and Sissy Spacek’s Holly in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973); Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette in Tony Scott’s True Romance (1993); or Shia LaBeouf and Sasha Lane in Andrea Arnold’s masterly American Honey (2016). There are whispers, too, of the Wim Wenders road trilogy (see Creative Sensemaker, 28 July 2022).

As much as life on the lam turbocharges their romance, the couple’s tragedy is the deeper knowledge that it is no life at all. Maren craves something approaching domesticity with her lover. “Let’s be people,” she says. “Let’s be them for a while.” But such an idyll seems unlikely for this Gen Z Bonnie and Clyde.

Second, Bones and All takes the horror genre of cannibal movies – the midnight flicks of the Seventies and Eighties – and turns it, against the odds, into a cinematic frame in which to explore disenfranchisement, marginalisation and loneliness. As Maren’s mother declares, reading from a letter: “the world of love wants no monsters in it.”

The feeding frenzies are certainly not for the faint-hearted (Russell, Chalamet and Rylance were actually eating a special mix of maraschino cherries, dark chocolate, and Fruit Roll-Ups). And Guadagnino undoubtedly knows Italian horror inside out: films such as Umberto Lenzi’s Man from the Deep River (1972), Nightmare City (1980) and Cannibal Ferox (1981), and the American movies they helped to inspire, such as Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno (2013).

Yet Bones and All has higher ambitions than such grindhouse fare (though it certainly seeks to shock and unnerve its audience). And the addictive urges of “eaters” such as Maren and Lee are also very far from the high camp and Grand Guignol aesthetic of the Hannibal Lecter movies and television series. Audaciously, Guadagnino invites us to feel pity for these doomed creatures; to present their macabre needs as a metaphor for the outsider’s identity. 

As Kajganich has remarked of the original novel: “I thought, I can understand this on a deeply personal level, having grown up gay in the Midwest in the closet, fearing for my safety in the 80s and all of these things”. (Sidenote: Guadagnino was not helped in this artistic endeavour by the coincidental embarrassment that Chalamet’s co-star in Call Me by Your Name, Armie Hammer, has been accused of a variety of sexual improprieties, including a cannibalism fetish – allegations which Hammer vehemently denies.)

Third, and most intriguingly, Bones and All carries some of the DNA of the Italian giallo movie – a genre made famous by directors such as Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Sergio Martino that Guadagnino explored explicitly in his 2018 remake of Argento’s Suspiria (1977). 

The precise definition of giallo is one that occupies cinéastes long into the winter nights and is not a rabbit hole to go down if you have any plans between now and Christmas (though if you are interested: try Federico Caddeo’s 2019 documentary All the Colors of Giallo or The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas).

Suffice to say: giallo, which takes its name from the yellow pages of Mondadori pulp novellas, is variously applied to suspenseful, violent movies, often involving particular weapons or modes of killing; operatic in their set piece style, dramatic use of music and creative oscillation between erotica and horror. Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth have both acknowledged their profound debt to the great gialli and their shared yearning to Americanise the genre in their own movies.

Though it is not a standard detective story or serial killer saga, Bones and All has many points of contact with the giallo style: not least in Arseni Khachaturan’s superb cinematography, the relentless kineticism of the plot, and the vivid use of music – notably, Joy Division’s ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘Lick it Up’ by Kiss, to which Chalamet dances energetically.

Romantic road movie; cannibal flick reimagined for the age of identity politics; or Oscar-worthy American giallo? Guadagnino’s film is all this, and much more. Certainly one of the finest releases of 2022, and a modern myth that lingers long in the mind like a fugitive dream, it is, in the best sense of the word, a true feast.