Venice Review: Timothée Chalamet & Taylor Russell In Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Bones And All’

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The beginning of Bones and All is genuinely the stuff of nightmares and could easily stand alone as a short, tapping into the American tradition of the urban myth while at the same time laying down a deceptively sophisticated narrative.

The rest of Luca Guadagnino’s latest doesn’t quite maintain this level of mastery and tension, which is in some ways a blessing, but that’s possibly because Bones and All isn’t really a horror movie.

After the shocking opening salvo, the film sheds its genre skin to become an almost anthropological study of outsiderdom, using the false dawn of the American 1980s as a sort of petri dish for a new kind of conformity that has led us where we are today.Venice Film Festival: Memorable Moments 1945-1984 GalleryThis opening scene involves a new girl in high school, Maren (Taylor Russell), who lives in spartan digs with a father who is very much also her keeper.

Invited to a sleepover, Maren creeps out of her bedroom, which is locked from the outside, to join a group of her peers. It’s the John Hughes moment, when the odd duck is accepted, but this, of course, is a Luca Guadagnino movie and there is no sugar coating: a scene of small but traumatic violence occurs, and Maren’s panicked return home explains everything: the lack of décor, the lock on the door and the bags ready-packed just in case.This proves too much for Maren’s father, who makes a moonlight getaway and leaves his daughter with a taped confession, explaining why he left and why Maren is what she is: a cannibal.