In the Flesh: Bones and All

Cannibal Bonnie and Clyde on a road trip to find their place in the world is a concept you’ve got to work at losing me on. As luck would have it, that’s just what Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All seems hell-bent on doing. Its few virtues — exquisite makeup and Foley, especially surrounding the acts of cannibalism themselves — can’t conceal its threadbare emptiness and the insufficiency of its stars, particularly Chalamet, who lack the gravitas necessary to sell its often ponderous tone. Mark Rylance does what might charitably be described as “a lot” as the unusual loner cannibal Sully, but no amount of disaffected Foghorn Leghorn strangeness can mask the fact that there isn’t much to the performance beyond these shabby bells and whistles.

So too with the film itself — an oddly fussy, stuffy affair for all that its subject matter is so nominally debased — which hangs a serviceable metaphor for the traumatic violence and isolation of poverty on a framework incapable of supporting it. Weak performances and fumbled emotional beats (I don’t know why on God’s green Earth you’d put Chloe Sevigney in a movie if you’re not going to let her talk) bog Bones and All Down until it’s not much more than the paper-thin indie romance it so closely resembles. Chalamet has neither the accent nor the range to give real life to his character, and Guadagnino’s script seems to fritter about the edges of life in poverty without ever really touching it, which hampers the film’s weak attempts at characterization. Taylor Russell is better as protagonist Maren Yearly, pouring herself into the film’s best moments — the lesbian-tinged tete-a-tete beneath the coffee table, the first instance of intentional eating, etc — in a way the other leads never manage.

Veteran actress Jessica Harper gives easily the film’s best performance as Maren’s grandmother, a cold and brittle woman bent past the breaking point by her absent daughter’s monstrosity yet still visibly engorged with racist venom toward Maren’s Black father. Her tremendous command over her diction and tone immediately shames the rest of the cast, and the always-excellent Sevigney’s appearance is limited to a bit of uninspired disability horror with her only lines spoken in voiceover. It’s a disinterested approach to casting, as indifferent as the film’s attitude toward its setting and subject matter. Guadagnino seems interested in nothing in particular, flitting from scene to scene in an aimless picaresque which utterly fails to flesh its players out. A moment’s flicker of life as Chalamet seduces a carnival worker and jerks him off in a field. Another as Michael Stuhlbarg makes a meal of his boilerplate hillbilly cannibal character, and then nothing. Bones and All is a cannibal movie without interest in cannibalism, a romance without passion or pathos, and a horror flick without a drop of fear or tension in its veins.