Bones and All

 

The best horror is not actually about the monsters that lurk outside -- in basements, under beds, in attics or in the woods -- but those we carry around with us, inside.

Director Luca Guadagnino's horror / road movie Bones and All is about two young cannibals in '80s America (Reagan can be heard in a radio broadcast). Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) meet in a food store in Indiana and decide to join forces in the joint mission of feeding their unholy craving for human flesh and finding Maren's mother, whom she has never met but believes is living in Minnesota.

Maren's father (Andre Holland) has been alone in protecting her from the authorities and herself, but after she gnaws on a classmate's finger at a sleep over, he exits leaving her with a few bucks and a cassette tape of her backstory, which she's never heard. Lee's family story is darker and more desperate and he only reveals it after he and Maren have endured many trials on their journey. He considers his story shameful.

These two bedraggled young people epitomize the disaffection of addiction, all scraggly deception and wandering. They go from day-to-day trying not to give in to despair.

During a campside meeting with a couple of grungy local eaters (Michael Stuhlbarg and David Gordon Green), Maren and Lee are told of the pinnacle (depth?) of cannibalism, devouring the whole person, bones and all. They are repulsed, and doubly so, when they discover one of the men is a volitional eater, not driven by cravings. Who would choose to do this? They run away.

When Maren is finally united with her mother (an unrecognizable Chloë Sevigny), who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital where she can no longer harm herself or others, the visit doesn't go well, and Maren leaves even more distressed.

Fearful and lost, Maren abandons Lee on the road while he's sleeping but runs into an older eater named Sully (the incomparable Mark Rylance) whom she first encountered shortly after leaving her home in Maryland. Sully's lurking presence -- his attentions are unsought and unwanted -- signals that predators can themselves be prey.

Russell and Chalamet, who along with Stuhlbarg worked with Guadagnino in the celebated 2017 film Call Me By Your Name, are wonderful as Maren and Lee, struggling with legacies of isolation and exclusion, finding little comfort in themselves or the few others like them they encounter, destined to live lives of damage and destruction until they, too, are destroyed. Sounds to me like the horror of addiction -- be the drug heroin or hate.