Movie Review: Bones and All

 

Michael's Movie Grade: A-

A wonderful film that is equal parts creepy and beautiful. 

Making a love story about two cannibals is something that very few filmmakers would ever try. Luckily Luca Guadagnino is not most filmmakers. What he creates here is a very unique and powerful thing. It is brilliant how this movie turns the characters that in most horror films would be the bad guys into the most sympathetic and relatable people. You truly get to care about our two main characters and see them as human beings rather than monsters. This is done heavily with how the characters don't eat people out of malice but instead because they have an unquenching desire to devour fellow human beings Our heroine desires nothing more than to simply be normal. She constantly feels guilty about this and constantly wonders if she is in fact a good person. Yet in the scenes where we see her feeding are indeed disturbing, making her both frightening and lovable at the same time. To think about whether or not she has a right to be happy and live a normal life is a huge question this movie brings up. As the movie goes on we have many complex emotions about this and the more complex these emotions get the more it leaves us unable to answer this question. Because of this, you leave the movie theater with a lot of food of thought and genuinely both emotionally and intellectually affected by what you just saw. Despite the dark and gruesome nature of such a film, there is a surprisingly sweetness behind the main romance. Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet have wonderful chemistry and the romance between them always feels completely real and believable. Yet this is not to say that the movie does not have any real scares. Some of the scenes in this film are truly scary. Some of the scariest scenes have to do with Mark Rylance's character. Every scene with this character pushes this movie completely into the horror realm. Mark Rylance is one of my favorite current working actors, however I have never seen him play a role like this before. He plays it incredibly well and makes each scene with him simply terrifying. Even in the scenes where he is not eating other people, we feel a sense of uneasy that makes us truly shiver. 

What truly makes this film wonderful is how well it can go from genre to genre. It can go from horror to romance to family drama to art film, while feeling completely natural the whole time. 

A truly great, one of a kind movie.