Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino, 2022)

One aspect of sci-fi and fantasy and even horror that I cannot stand is the necessity, if not overabundance, of explanation - world building or origin stories or plumbed childhoods designed to justify why the supernatural/mayhem is happening, a dreary, utilitarian waste of time in my experience. It's why the musical is my favorite Hollywood genre; spontaneous outbursts of song are just that - singing out with no justification or even a source for the music (except when there is, e.g., Enchanted, the "Once More With Feeling" episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc.). So it stuns me to report that Bones and All desperately needs some justification. 

It's the 1980s in flyover America and Maren (Taylor Russell) is experiencing some of the most palpable teenage angst imaginable. She is a cannibal and has such difficulty controlling her impulses that her father (André Holland) abandons her. Thus begins a de facto road movie as Maren tries to figure out her affliction. She meets several other cannibals, the sexiest among them being Lee (Timothée Chalamet). Of course, a romance blossoms. But will they be able to keep each other's impulses in check?

Guadagnino has a superb eye for the bombed-out locales of Mid-South America (or what my pal Jeremy Posadas would call Appohzarka and the Heartland and mid-Atlantic South). But since the contours of the cannibalism are sloppily explained, we are never sure what exactly is at stake for the principals or what their plight has to do with the abandoned hamlets in which they take up residency. The final act implies that Maren and Lee can, indeed, keep their cannibalism in check and they are on their way to the straight and narrow before an even more sloppily conceived dénouement changes their plans forever. But while Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich (basing his script on Camille DeAngelis's novel) leave too much of the story to implication, they bask in gore with a sensationalist specificity. The thrill of showing fresh-faced youth chewing on human flesh quite overwhelmed any sense of narrative drive or even purpose. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008) managed to situate its gore within a specific socioeconomic context. But if Guadagnino and Kajganich were after some sort of allegory about how capitalism in its death throes forces American to feat on one another, then the connection just does not come through. Why the 1980s exactly? Why Maryland then Kentucky then Michigan? 

Grade: B-minus (and dropping)