Producers: Luca Guadagnino, Theresa Park, Marco Morabito, David Kajganich, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, Lorenzo Mieli, Gabriele Moratti, Peter Spears and Timothée Chalamet   Director: Luca Guadagnino   Screenplay: David Kajganich    Cast: Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland, Chloë Sevigny, David Gordon Green, Jessica Harper, Jake Horowitz, David Gordon Green, Burgess Byrd, Anna Cobb and Kendle Coffey   Distributor: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/United Artists

Grade: C+

Maybe cannibals can’t compete numerically with vampires in movies, but there have been plenty of them over the years—among the best-known Hannibal Lecter and Leatherface (or, to note a personal favorite, the dad played by Randy Quaid in Bob Balaban’s criminally underappreciated 1989 “Parents”).  Just a few months ago Mimi Cave’s “Fresh” found horror humor in cannibalism’s moneymaking potential.  But the subject has rarely been the stuff of woozy romanticism, as it is in Luca Guadagnino’s “Bones and All,” which to a certain extent does for cannibals what the “Twilight” series did for vampires.  But it eschew that franchise’s adolescent sappiness in favor of something grimmer.     

Based on a 2015 YA novel by Camille DeAngelis set in the 1980s, it opens with a situation not unlike the start of Tomas Alfredson’s child-vampire film “Let the Right One In” and Matt Reeves’s English-language remake “Let Me In”: teen Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell) lives in Virginia with her father Frank (André Holland), who carefully locks her into her bedroom each night.  But she sneaks out for a sleepover with some classmates, during which she nonchalantly bites off a girl’s finger.  Racing back to her father, she’s ordered to pack up quickly before the police arrive, and soon the two have resettled in Maryland. 

But here the story diverges from Alfredson’s.  Instead of continuing to protect Maren, Frank abandons her, leaving behind a bit of cash and an audio tape explaining that he can no longer deal with her craving for human flesh, which she first exhibited when she was three and killed and consumed a babysitter.  They’ve been on the run ever since.  Frank has also left her birth certificate, which indicates that she was born in a small Minnesota town and that the name of her mother, who disappeared when she was an infant, was Janelle Kerns.

Alone for the first time, Maren hops a bus in hopes of eventually tracking down her mother, but winds up stranded in Ohio, where she’s recognized as a fellow “eater” by Sully (Mark Rylance), a soft-spoken, strangely accommodating older man who takes her under his wing, instructing her that her need for sustenance will only increase.  Together they invade a house where an elderly woman lies dying, and after she breathes her last greedily devour the corpse together.  But disconcerted by Sully’s advances, and by eccentricities like his habit of crafting a long rope of from the hair of his victims, she takes off on her own.

In Indiana she encounters another eater, a young man named Lee (Timothée Chalamet), and accepts his invitation to travel to his hometown in Kentucky, where they meet his younger sister Kayla (Anna Cobb), a “normal” person who’s unaware of her brother’s appetites.  They decide to drive to Minnesota to search for Janelle, and while passing through Missouri encounter Jake (Michael Stuhlbarg), a redneck eater who reveals that his companion Brad (David Gordon Green) is not actually an eater himself but indulges in cannibalism by choice.  This disgusts Maren and she and Lee depart hastily, but in Iowa Lee has an erotic encounter with a carnival worker (Jake Horowitz) that ends in the man’s death—and a revelation about the dead man’s  life that reinforces how morally dark an eater’s choices necessarily are.

By now “Bones and All”—the title refers to the consumption of an entire body, down to the last morsel (a rare occurrence)—has turned into a picaresque, a road movie punctuated by horrendous moments that, in terms of blood and gore, go far beyond the killings of a film like “Badlands,” in which sparks of romance have begun to sprout between two unusual young people, both sympathetic and dangerous.  They continue to Minnesota looking for Maren’s mother—and they succeed by contacting her adoptive mother Barbara (Jessica Harper) and, using the information she provides, locating Janelle (Chloë Sevigny), a long-term resident of a mental facility.  But Janelle hardly proves welcoming, and in the process Sully reappears, obsessed with enticing Maren to join him.  When she and Lee, now a couple, attempt to create as normal a life for themselves as they can, Sully intervenes in their dream with tragic results, compelling them to express their desire to be together in a decidedly ironic way.  Like “Romeo and Juliet,” this is not a tale of young lovers that ends blissfully.

The focus of the story is clearly Maren, and Russell responds with a soulful performance that expresses the girl’s desperate attempts to come to terms with the fact of who, and what, she is.  As the young man who becomes her chief support, Chalamet equals her as a sympathetic figure, especially when he reveals the sad facts of his own past.  (Guadagnino, who utilized the actor’s good looks to great effect in “Call Me By Your Name,” doubles down here, sometimes pausing for what might pass for a glossy magazine still of his profile—an understandable choice, perhaps, but also artistically an unfortunate one.)

Guadagnino moreover, surrounds his two stars with supporting performers he encourages to chew the scenery, and even the most distinguished of them respond enthusiastically to the prompt.  Rylance, ordinarily so restrained, smolders as Sully, a quiet figure but one seething with volcanic lust, and toward the close he turns positively manic.  It’s the sort of performance that looks like underplaying but is really overplaying.  Stuhlbarg, another returnee who was so thoughtfully nuanced in “Name,” smacks his lips with abandon in his brief turn, and Green follows his lead.  And as Maren’s troubled mother Sevigny is positively ferocious.  Others in the cast are not quite so over-the-top, but it’s a matter of degree.  Of course in what’s basically a horror film, underplaying is rarely what’s wanted.  But here it is, and while the stars provide it, the others generally don’t.  Rather they indulge in the sort of turns that marred the director’s misguided remake of “Suspiria.”

Some of the images in the film are striking (and not just by reason of the sanguinary profusion), but production designer Elliot Hostetter, costumer Giulia Piersanti and cinematographer Arseni Khatchaturan opt overall for a gritty, rather ragged look, and editor Marco Costa is unafraid to let scenes ramble and transitions feel clumsy; some of the montages are positively messy in every sense.  A spare score, heavy on guitars, adds to the ambience of rustic simplicity.

Guadagnino’s attempt to juggle disparate tones and tropes is ambitious and he secures surprisingly affecting turns from his young leads, but in the end the film’s mixture of horror and romance doesn’t quite cohere.              

Producers: Ram Bergman and Rian Johnson   Director: Rian Johnson   Screenplay: Rian Johnson   Cast: Daniel Craig, Edward Norton, Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick, Madelyn Cline, Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Ethan Hawke, Noah Segan, Jackie Hoffman and Dallas Roberts   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C+

In a Zoom conversation near the start of Rian Johnson’s sequel to his surprise smash “Knives Out,” two of the participants appearing on the computer screen of tech mogul Miles Bron (Edward Norton) are Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim.  Their presence is a clue to what “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” aspires to be.  On the one hand it’s meant as an Agatha Christie-style detective tale—after all, in “Murder She Wrote” Lansbury was effectively a modern-day Miss Marple.  Sondheim’s presence might be construed as just a nod to her seminal performance in “Sweeney Todd,” but it’s really much more.  The great Broadway composer-lyricist was also a puzzle aficionado, and collaboration with the like-minded Anthony Perkins wrote “The Last of Sheila,” Herbert Ross’s 1973 film that, with its Mediterranean setting and wickedly convoluted murder plot, was no doubt an inspiration for Johnson.

But this is a “Knives Out” mystery, and so the detective is the famed Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who’s among the guests invited, via a complicated box puzzle, to an elite bash on Bron’s private Greek island, the Glass Onion—so called from a magnificent transparent globe atop the main building (which also houses his prize sports car) in 2019, just as the pandemic has taken hold.  But there’s a mysterious element at once—Bron claims not to have invited him at all.

Nonetheless he joins the other guests, who, thanks to a special spray administered by Bron’s aide (Ethan Hawke), can go mask-less for the duration.  All are in some sense so-called disrupters, and to some extent dependent on Bron’s largesse.  There’s Connecticut governor Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn), an ordinary housewife promoted as battling corruption and running for the Senate. Duke Cody (Dave Bautista) is a muscled, crudely macho internet sensation who totes his gun even when swimming and is joined by his bosomy young girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline), while ditzy Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson) is an erstwhile supermodel and designer of a popular brand of sweatpants; she’s accompanied by her aide Peg (Jessica Henwick).  Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom, Jr.) is a brilliant scientist employed by Bron.

There’s one guest who, like Blanc, is unexpected—Cassandra, or Andi, Brand (Janelle Monáe), Bron’s former business partner.  She was swindled in a hostile breakup of their partnership and thought unlikely to accept his invitation to come and work out their problems.  But she has.

Bron announces his intention to amuse the motley crew, like the host in “Sheila,” with a game.  Here it’s the old murder ploy: Bron will be the victim, and it will be up to the “survivors” to identify the perpetrator.  (The game devised by James Coburn in the Sondheim-Perkins concoction was more cerebral and clever.)  Naturally a real murder does occur, instigating a process of ratiocination on Blanc’s part that results in the revelation of the culprit and a kind of justice.

It would be unfair to reveal anything about the intricacies of the plot, save to say that Johnson takes advantage of lots of flashbacks and repetition of scenes from different perspectives to fashion an ultra-complicated scenario to defy solution by viewers, though not, of course, by Blanc.  Truth be told, he also indulges in a couple of hoary tricks that connoisseurs of detective fiction would sneer at, deeming them cheats; and despite his best efforts, the explosive conclusion comes as a bit of a letdown.

In the end, however, that probably won’t bother most viewers overmuch.  They’ll be content to be flummoxed by the twists and turns, and by the game efforts of the cast, even though they’re playing one-note caricatures.  Craig certainly seems to relish adopting a broad accent as the shamus whose air of reticence abruptly vanishes when he springs forward with a brilliant conclusion, and whose sense of dandified style is almost as complete as Poirot’s.  It’s also good to see Norton in a major role again; his film appearances have been too rare of late.  He makes Bron a complete douchebag, the very essence of the sort of disgustingly acquisitive self-styled genius so much in the news nowadays.  The picture is also visually eye-catching, with an elegant production design by Rick Heinrichs and colorful costumes by Jenny Eagen, all caught in sumptuous images by cinematographer Steve Yedlin.  Bob Ducsay’s editing helps to keep the plot’s swerves fair even though at well over two hours the film is too long, and Nathan Johnson’s score doesn’t push the wink-wink level beyond endurance.

Yet despite its many felicities, this sequel is less of a Thanksgiving treat than its predecessor was three years ago.  In part that’s the result of the familiarity of the formula, but also of an overblown approach that increases the feeling of artificiality and smugness.  As a puzzle “Onion” passes muster, but while one can admire the ingeniousness of the clockwork mechanism Johnson sets running here, as it counts down it proves to be less fun than it should.