The weird thing about Bones and All, the much-lauded second movie in which Luca Guadagnino directs Timothée Chalamet (after Call Me By Your Name), is that the book it’s based on seems to be… not really about his character. Camille DeAngelis’ novel is described as “at once a gorgeously written horror story as well as a mesmerizing meditation on female power and sexuality.”
This looks like something else.
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Leech
Of course, trailers can be deceiving, and probably the film’s producers are banking on the Chalamet/Guadagnino teamup—and less on Taylor Russell (who did excellent work in Lost in Space). Russell plays Maren, Chalamet plays Lee; they seem to be making their way through a rather unwelcoming countryside, being young murderers in love. Probably at least one of them is a cannibal, if the book’s summary is anything to go on, but what we see here is more murder than munching. The film also stars Mark Rylance, Chloë Sevigny, Call Me By Your Name‘s Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland, David Gordon Green, Jessica Harper, Jake Horowitz, Francesca Scorsese, and Anna Cobb.
With this trailer, MGM isn’t really offering much by way of summary, just the phrase “You can’t run from who you are.” Chalamet’s Lee generally seems to be a violent drifter with questionable fashion sense. But there’s more going on here than smooching and stabbing. Guadagnino told IndieWire, “With Bones and All, I wasn’t interested at all in the shock value, which I hate. I was interested in these people. I understood their moral struggle very deeply. I understood what was happening to them. I am not there to judge anybody. You can make a movie about cannibals if you’re there in the struggle with them, and you’re not codifying cannibalism as a topic or a tool for horror.”
Bones and All is in theaters November 23rd.
