Bones and All

 

Bones and All

Director – Luca Guadagnino

Writers – David Kajganich (screenplay by), Camille DeAngelis (based on the novel by)

2022, Italy-United States

Stars – Timothée Chalamet, Taylor Russell, Mark Rylance

 

All I knew was that Luca Guadagnino was directing and that this was covered on the Evolution of Horror podcast. I knew nothing else, and that the poster looked like a coming-of-age drama but being featured on EOH peaked my interest even more. So, thoroughly clueless, the opening shocker came as a pleasant and gruesome surprise. Oh, so this’ll be the real deal, I thought. And it is that too.

 

[And here’s the spoiler alert.]

 

Then Maren (Taylor Russel) is left by her father and starts a road movie to find her mother. Then she meets a tour de force performance of ambiguous creepiness from Mark Rylance – a balancing act he keeps up right up to the end – and then meets Timothée Chalamet, translating their otherness as a junky hustler’s odyssey. This otherness, outsiderness, is what they call being an “eater”. Then they meet Michael Stuhlbarg, who matches Rylance creep-for-creep, possible threat for possible threat. It becomes obvious that this tale is almost as freewheeling as a Jarmusch ramble, except a little more control of the pace and a little trimming might have stopped the Young Adult source starting to dominate. This is despite the fact that the editing will chop short scenes to keep the flow (the opening montage of the empty school hallways that begins the film immediately set the tone and got me). And yes, we are in the realm where screenwriter David Kajganich says he doesn’t really think it’s a horror and seems a little disappointed when Mike Muncer says that’s how he sees it (Evolution of Horror podcast). Horror has long been gleefully eloquently mashing-up genres so somewhat dreamy coming-of-age horror for strong stomachs really shouldn’t be seen as beneath intelligence or sophisticated emotion.

 

But the horror moments are strong stuff, and the film-makers conviction that it had to be was why it had to be independently financed, surely why the supporting cast is so, so impressive – everyone gets a memorable showpiece – and why the YA tropes don’t quite come to dominate. Indeed, Guadagnino will fade out the dialogue when it threatens to get bad and leaves Reznor and Ross’ score or a moody song take over, which simultaneously circumnavigates cheesiness but steers unapologetically into wordless melodrama. As well as the eating.

 

Perhaps a little too slacker, a little too YA for those looking for straight-out horror, but it’s a fascinating wandering road movie horror with the dangerous youths just trying to mimic normality and fit in. That it takes its potentially adolescent concept of all-consuming love equating to cannibalism means it is never quite sentimental or silly - and the players steer clear of this too - grounding their moral conflicts in the gore set-pieces. And yes, as is typical of the road movie genre, it’s quite often a series of vignettes and for that occasionally it feels it isn’t quite gelling. But the cast are fantastic, it’s beautifully shot, Guadagnino leaning on the poetic-romantic and gonzo-gruesome in equal measure, and although it is not poignant or revelatory in its portrayal of outsiders, its meandering nature means you never quite know which genre it’s going to pit stop next. It also means you can take the morsels you want from it, romantic, mood piece, actor's showcase, arthouse road movie or horror.

Crimes of the Future

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

Writer & Director - David Cronenberg

2022 ~ Canada

Stars - Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart

Judging a film on what has gone before surely only goes so far. Mark Kermode’s review has been reduced to mostly one just namechecking the obvious nods to Cronenberg’s previous works as if this mitigates ‘Crimes of the Future’s worth. But Cronenberg is totally self-aware and deliberate – oh, ‘Videodrome’ TVs; ‘Dead Ringers’ wish for a beauty pageant for internal organs, ‘Shivers’ autopsy; a chair that could be furniture from ‘Naked Lunch’, etc. – which surely means he is slotting this into the tapestry of what he originated. The ae debate. ‘Crimes of the Future’ even takes its title from Cronenberg’s earliest works; the conspiracies and underground rebel groups are the kind from ‘Scanners’ and the dirty dilapidated rooms and backstreets remind me of Interzone (‘Naked Lunch’). Saying “This is just like his earlier stuff and that was better” doesn’t really say much about how it therefore relates to Cronenberg’s oeuvre, or its independent merits, o. Easter egg spotting doesn’t illuminate more than homages, influences and derivatives. But when the artist is drawing from his own extensive back catalogue, and when that artist is Cronenberg, there’s more at play.  

If this namechecking is meant as a criticism of thematic and artistic repetition, and therefore inferiority and stunted artistic growth, I would argue that this too doesn’t quite enlighten: there’s Tarantino’s or Scorsese’s recourse to ensemble criminals, or Schrader’s lost male existential angst, or Bergman’s existential concerns, Ozu’s family dramas, or, etc. And if anyone has established his themes and held them close throughout a long career, it's Cronenberg. He is even credited with forming a subgenre known as body-horror.

Rather, that Cronenberg can still capture the spirit of the muse that set him off appeared a little remarkable to me, rather than reductive, considering how singular it is and with the evolution of his extensive filmography. ‘Crimes of the Future’ is just as talky, uneven, occasionally disturbing, visceral and not-quite-gelling, a little confusing, a little random, viscerally inventive and a little prescient as his earliest body-horrors. As soon as Mortenson said, “My bed needs new software,” I chuckled, because knew I was in Cronenberg’s world and therefore in safe hands for a somewhat messy palette of provocative ideas firing off here and there. But what we also have is the latter-day Cronenberg inclusion of pretty/slicker visuals and elegance smoothing down the scruffiness of exploitation. The opening shot of a boy framed with a sunken ship is a gorgeous holiday picture subversion. Then he eats a waste bin and the oddness is introduced to the narrative. That’s the surprise that sets questions; and then the mother murders the boy and that’s a shock. Then cut to a quite beautiful medium shot of an odd levitating bed-mechanism in which Mortensen is moaning in his sleep.

The husk of a ship also appears later as the backdrop to Saul Tester’s (Mortenson) clandestine meetings. Throughout there are clues to a ruined world that is hinted at but never explicated. The clues scattered around are what provide fun and discussion when trying to figure it out afterwards. The capsized society signified by the boat is at odds with the expense and luxury of the artists we follow, who indulge in body self-mutilation in a manifestation of cultural confusion of finding the human race has turned immune to pain. But there’s an obvious divide between the poverty and disenfranchisement alluded to by those grubby backstreets and the hipsters that are our protagonists.

It is the questions left hanging, the pictures you can extrapolate and paint that makes this more that sum of its parts. It’s focused on one subculture’s response to the next phase of human evolution, but its proposition that Those In Power will always try and thwart this and any arguable progression that strikes true. It also has a prod at Look At me Art culture without recourse to mobile phones. 

But then there’s some nudity which, for the first time in a Cronenberg film, felt to me to be gratuitous. And although some enjoy Kristen Stewart’s performance seemingly for camp value, its wink and neediness seem out-of-tune with the careful calibrations of tone elsewhere. But Cronenberg was always a little messy and uneven at times. Raw is the word, even if the ideas are serious and dense. 

That is, to say, even if you judge this lesser Cronenberg, ‘Crimes of the Future’ is still fully spiced with a headful of ideas that interrogate culture, evolution and technology and reaches existential and exploitational ruminations characteristic of this singular director. What this film tells is that Cronenberg is no less an interrogator of these themes than he ever was at this later point in his career.