Bones and All
2022 · Luca Guadagnino
Abandoned by her father, a young woman embarks on a thousand-mile odyssey through the backroads of America where she meets a disenfranchised drifter. But despite their best efforts, all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and to a final stand that will determine whether their love can survive their otherness.
dir. Luca Guadagnino · 2022
For his first film shot on American soil, Luca Guadagnino turned Camille DeAngelis's young-adult cannibal novel into something closer to Badlands: a mournful road movie drifting through the underpasses and cornfields of the Reagan-era Midwest. Taylor Russell, in the performance that announced her, plays a teenager cut loose by her father who learns she is not alone in her appetite; Timothée Chalamet, reuniting with the director of Call Me by Your Name, is the wounded drifter who joins her. The horror is real — Mark Rylance is skin-crawlingly gentle as an older 'eater' who materializes out of the dark — but Guadagnino treats the hunger as inheritance and stigma, a fable of anyone made monstrous by what they never chose. Arseni Khachaturan shoots gas stations and prairie dusk on 35mm with the melancholy of a stranger's photographs of America, while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, in a career about-face, supply a hushed score of fingerpicked guitar. Venice gave Guadagnino the Silver Lion for direction and Russell its Mastroianni prize for emerging talent.
Lines of influence
- Badlands (1973) — The core template Guadagnino cites: fugitive young lovers driving across a flat, sun-bleached Midwest, their spree narrated in affectless voiceover with natural light and real landscape standing in for moral weather.
- Days of Heaven (1978) — Establishes the magic-hour, available-light naturalism—wheat fields and empty horizons shot as lyric—that Arseni Khachaturan's 35mm rural cinematography reproduces.
- The Night of the Hunter (1955) — Mark Rylance's Sully, the courtly predator who stalks vulnerable prey across Americana, descends directly from Mitchum's menacing itinerant preacher and his sing-song false gentleness.
- Near Dark (1987) — Reframes the vampire as a roaming 'family' of American road predators feeding across the heartland—the exact cannibal-as-outsider road-horror architecture Bones and All inherits.
- Call Me by Your Name (2017) — Guadagnino's own tactile, sun-warmed coming-of-age intimacy—lingering skin, appetite as tenderness, Chalamet as object of longing—carried whole into the central romance.
- Paris, Texas (1984) — The drifter traversing an emptied American Southwest, using widescreen landscape as loneliness and a spare roots-music score to make silence expressive.
- Let the Right One In (2008) — Tender first-love between an adolescent and a creature who must kill to survive—monstrous compulsion staged as the ache of coming-of-age rather than as spectacle.
- Bonnie and Clyde (1967) — Depression-era outlaw lovers whose romantic road-spree welds tenderness to sudden, unstylized eruptions of violence—the tonal whiplash the film runs on.
- Wanda (1970) — The aimless, marginalized woman drifting through a grubby, deglamorized American landscape in grainy handheld naturalism—Maren's rootless texture and social invisibility.
- Raw (2016) — Cannibalism written as pubescent awakening: an inherited appetite one cannot control, staged as body-horror coming-of-age about a young woman discovering what she is.
- We Are What We Are (2013) — Cannibalism handed down as family ritual and stigma in rural America—the theme of inheritance-and-stigma worked through a slow, elegiac genre register.
- American Honey (2016) — Itinerant youth crisscrossing the Midwest in a loose, immersive road movie shot on boxy 35mm with nonprofessional textures and restless natural light.
- Nomadland (2020) — A naturalistic landscape road film of American outsiders living at the economic margins, dignity found in movement and dusk-lit exteriors of the plains.
- The Social Network (2010) — The origin point of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's film-scoring method—brooding, textured synth-and-piano dread—that underscores Maren and Lee's romance.
- Challengers (2024) — Guadagnino re-teams with Reznor and Ross, extending the same collaboration into a propulsive electronic score that drives bodily desire as narrative engine.
- Suspiria (2018) — Guadagnino's prior plunge into horror, demonstrating his method of an art-cinema sensualist metabolizing genre viscera through slow-burn atmosphere rather than shock cutting.