Bones and All (2022, Luca Guadagnino) (Patreon)

35/100

Never saw any of the Twilight movies, but this is more or less how I imagine them: painfully earnest youngsters vacillating between horniness and violence, with some facile moral reckoning thrown in now and then for variety's sake. Starts off strong with a legitimately disturbing feed that comes out of nowhere (it's as if The Virgin Suicides suddenly turned into Raw), then immediately falls prey to clumsy exposition—having Maren listen to Dad's cassette in discrete chunks across multiple states and half the movie doesn't make that device any more, uh, palatable—and a series of Special Guest Cannibal appearances that I'd call increasingly hammy had it not kicked off with Mark Rylance's strained attempt at Southern Gothic ghastly-courtly. (Also it's just kinda silly that after nearly two decades of believing herself to be uniquely freakish, Maren suddenly starts encountering fellow cannibals around every corner. Yeah, they seek her out after smelling her, but that would have been happening all along with this apparent population density.) Once Chalamet shows up, it's YA all the way, culminating in an overripe finale that cutely literalizes carnal hunger (and gets actuated by the unwelcome return of Rylance's Sully, whose motivation for tracking Maren cross-country never makes a lick of sense). Mostly mediocre, but a couple of especially stupid flourishes pushed me over the line into active hostility: (1) Maren saying "Stop calling yourself Sully" with the precise timing and cadence of someone who knows it's the kiss-off line in an action flick, and particularly (2) Maren's mom patiently waiting for a visual indication that Maren has reached the final, alarming sentence of her letter (written 15 years earlier!) and thereby perfectly timing her unexpected attack. It's not quite acting in concert with another character’s non-diegetic voiceover narration, but it's moronically close.