Cannibals are the ultimate drama queens. Forget vegans, the lactose intolerant, those who remain vigilant against gluten: No one has to worry more than a cannibal about where the next meal is coming from. Beyond that, cannibal love poses additional problems. How to broach the subject of this dietary proclivity with someone you’re attracted to? Or is it better to associate only with your kind, to break bread—or whatever—only with those wholly in tune with your needs and impulses?
Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, playing at the 79th Venice Film Festival, pleads sympathy for those who crave human flesh: in the movie’s universe, they’re tragic figures, a little like vampires but not nearly as sexy, people who didn’t ask to be born with such unholy cravings but who must learn to live with them nonetheless. (The movie was adapted from Camille DeAngelis’ 2016 novel of the same name.) Guadagnino’s film is artful and tender, if occasionally almost too tense and brutal to bear. Watching it—waiting to see where it was going to end up, and finding myself in thrall to one performance in particular—I wondered if this film might haunt me forever. But after it was over, I found I could shake its spell easily. Bones and All is fastidiously romantic. It’s so carefully made, and so lovely to look at, even at its grisliest, that it ends up seeming a little remote, rather than a movie that draws you close. Still, its actors give you something to watch every minute. And Guadagnino—whose last movie was the drab 2018 Suspiria remake—at least keeps this extended metaphor for loneliness and alienation whirring. Whatever else you might say about it, Bones and All is never boring.
And the movie’s first third or so is truly haunting: we meet lonely teenager Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell, the sensational young actor who anchored Trey Edward Shults’ underappreciated 2019 family drama Waves),…
Source : time
