Bones and All

Bones and All is a film that wears its heart (and its lungs, and its liver, and its kidneys) on its sleeve. Everything that ought to be inside is suddenly out: organs and blood vessels, of course, but shame and desire and alienation too, made legible like a blush across skin. Based on the YA novel by Camilla DeAngelis, Luca Guadagnino’s film about two cannibalistic teenagers (Maren, played by Taylor Russell, and Lee, played by Timothée Chalamet) translates the hungry, grisly wants of coming-of-age into a raw and grief-stricken fairy tale of life lived on the fringes.

Its premise may be relatively well-trodden, yet while Bones and All doesn’t quite escape the tropey frills of its source material, Guadagnino’s fingerprints are all over his adaptation: in the bruised, longing fragmentation of memory that ruptures, in the slant queerness of desire enacted in the shadows. The setting – a sun-bleached Americana sometime in the 1980s – imbues the film with an overwhelming, analogue tactility that carries over to its two leads, with Chalamet’s trademark tremulous physicality playing against Russell’s portrait of rigid loss. Every experience in Bones and All is cast in the body, in the buzz of rot-seeking flies against the ears and the slick of gore against the tongue.

It succeeds where star-crossed teen films before it have failed, perhaps because the sheer violence at stake is given its due weight – unravelling the smeared blood and bone-crunching sickness of adolescence, where the tenderest, most impetuous of feelings sit hard alongside a shattering appetite for things we mustn’t want. “The world of love wants no monsters in it,” Maren’s mother tells her, but here is a film that is so entirely monstrous, and so entirely flush with love. All of us, Guadagnino's film knows, are trying to run from our bloodied pasts. We are all seeking a way to belong.

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Bones and All had its world premiere at Venice Film Festival