Reviews

From what I've seen of positive reviews of this movie, there's really only one thing that people enjoy: the creature design of the monsters. They are quite gruesome and memorable--part cockroach, part shoebill stork directly descended from dinosaurs, part hellspawn lyncanthrope, part xenomorph, part uncanny valley katsina doll, part (according to the filmmakers) Disney's Goofy. They behave extremely unpredictably, move in infesting packs, and are not quite like anything I've seen before in a horror film. The movie makes no attempt to explain where they came from, what they are, what they want, or anything else about their natural history, and that's a good choice--the mystery is what keeps them scary. They don't even have any catchy trademark name that all the people in this world refer to them by, which is nice! Benjamin Brewer is foremost a visual effects artist, and this is apparent in the fact that his creature design is the only aspect of this film that is at all good.

Unfortunately, a cool monster design can't sustain even this 90 minute chore. The acting is fine, but the writing and directing give the actors little opportunity to make their characters and world feel lived in. I never got a real sense that these were three family members who depended upon each other and had limited interaction with any other human beings; they seemed more like strangers who were teaming up for the first time--or, rather, actors who had just arrived on set. There are no instances I can remember where the characters did (or said) anything that seemed to confirm the reality of their dreary existence. A knife-stabbing "Are we not men?" ritual during one dinner scene is the closest example I can think of, but that peculiarity is undercut by a dozen more examples of half-baked dystopian cosplay. For instance, why is Thomas's haircut so godawful? If you've been cutting your own hair for your entire life--or even if this happens to be the first time that the teenager insisted on cutting his own hair rather than letting his father do it--the end result isn't going to scream "civilization has just ended." Civilization ended fifteen years ago. They would've adapted to having no more Hair Cutteries.

The plot is extremely thin and riddled with implausible character choices as well as numerous extraordinary coincidences. Too often, things happen only because the screenplay needs them to happen. The characters are paper thin, and there's really nothing that this movie even attempts to explore thematically; like lots of other postapocalyptic films, this one doesn't have anything to say about humanity, civilization, or its downfall. All it really has to offer, truly, is a creepy creature design.

That would be fine maybe if the movie were exquisitely edited--if the encounters with the monsters were shot in such a way that they were actually terrifying, nerve-racking, or gripping. They're not. In fact, the blocking of many scenes (for instance, in the cave) doesn't make any logical sense at all; if you can't even figure out the layout that the characters are confined in and what's physically possible within that space, then how can you be concerned about them being trapped or not trapped? Sometimes the camera just cuts and a character has bypassed an obstacle without any explanation. This is a movie where characters overcome obstacles simply through the aid of the screenwriter beginning the next scene. Likewise, the only thing positive I can say about the editing is that the movie ended before it had completely overstayed its welcome.

Feel free to hit that fast forward button and "skim" this movie if you're still curious; as long as you see the ten minutes of monster scenes, then you're not missing anything.

I found myself unable to suspend disbelief for a single moment during the entirety of watching this overlong movie, and of the thousands of movies I've seen in my life, I can't recall ever having such similar discomfort. This movie made my brain hurt, and there wasn't a single positive attribute (except maybe the soundtrack) to alleviate that pain. Since its inception, Pixar has been committed to building worlds out of fantastical premises: what if toys were sentient, what if cars were people, what if our emotions were personalities who inhabited a surreal geography within our minds. They've made movies that weren't very great, but never, in my opinion, was that due to a failure at worldbuilding. For instance, I wasn't the biggest fan of INSIDE OUT, but it wasn't because I couldn't get on board with its depiction of our brains' interiors; rather, it was because I thought the real-world plot was too simplistic, melodramatic, and unbelievable, unable to properly sustain the fantasy world within. For ELEMENTAL, I can't help but imagine its origins in some burnt out writer sitting in a stifling office, in need of sleep, perhaps intoxicated, thinking, "Well, what if a fire woman and a water man, like, had sex? I don't think that's been done before." And then that premise, which could have only been sustained in a two-minute, extremely experimental and surreal short film, was workshopped in a series of uninspired Zoom brainstorming meetings where instead of trying to figure out how this bizarre idea could be developed into a character-based plot, the other writers only felt safe pitching the most obvious jokes: what if the water man, like, cries all the time? And if she's made of fire, then, like, maybe she eats really hot food! And that, moreover, instead of then trying to develop these obvious jokes into actual silliness that could be the main (and only) attraction of the film, they instead put extremely little effort into the humor and instead somehow got the idea that they were making a serious film about failing infrastructure and the emotional obligations of second-generation immigrants. The end result is an uncomfortable and lifeless mess.

I could not for the life of me wrap my mind around this universe. There are "earth" people who look like trees and dirt and flowers, but the buildings also have hardwood floors and the fire people eat "coal nuts" made by compressing pieces of firewood in their own piping hot hands. They explain at one point that a "water person" is "not just water," so clearly there's a distinction between "elemental people" and inanimate objects that are made of those elements, but I still couldn't get over the fact that if I were a tree person, I would probably be horrified by the fact that fire people eat things that look like my babies. This kind of confusion inevitably haunts every frame of the film. I could not wrap my mind around the characters' basic stupidity surrounding things such as evaporation and condensation, and I was deeply unsettled by the abject boundarylessness of their bodily forms--that in "Elemental City," air people are constantly being walked through, earth people are constantly having their leaves burned off, and water people are frequently being sucked into puddles and floods but still manage to hold onto their clothing... which, why and how are they wearing clothing and what is it made of? The people are chaotic and boundaryless, yet they live in a city that has building inspectors and bureaucracy. The population should all be used to certain facts about their coexistence, yet every character seems constantly surprised by the strange sights happening all around them. The whole plot is built on a modern conception of ethnic segregation, yet the premise segments the population groups based on premodern taxonomies that couldn't possibly be segregated. Isn't a cloud just the gaseous state of liquid water? If fire and water have a baby, then will it be a cloud? If the cloud baby gains too much weight, then does she look more like her water mother? The movie constantly asks you to consider these things while also forcing you to not think too hard about these things because of how obvious it is that the filmmakers haven't thought very hard about these things because if they had thought about these things then they would realize that the film could not exist. It's dizzying and unlike any movie experience I've had before.

All that aside, the romantic plot is entirely devoid of chemistry and heart. The acting is abysmal, and the two leads, who are supposedly young adults, speak and behave like eight-year-olds. The film very obviously wants to be an allegory for realistic American people, yet there's no humanity whatsoever in how these characters are written. If you strip away the disorienting fantastical premise, which is pretty easy to do, then you have a very poorly written and acted Hallmark romcom. If the animation were at least appealing, then there would at least be that, but instead this is probably the least visually pleasing movie Pixar has ever made. I watched the movie two days ago yet cannot recall a single image that I was impressed by. Only the score and soundtrack are halfway inspired.

Writing this, I feel like I might be coming across as a jerk who just doesn't like animated fantasy family films. So in contrast, I point you to ROBOT DREAMS, a movie that is up against ELEMENTAL at the Oscars this year and is not altogether different. It's a feature length film without dialogue about a New York City inhabited by humanoid animals of all species as well as their sentient robot friends. There are ducks who are people wearing hot pants and driving motorcycles and there are pigeons who are just pigeons, and this does not feel weird. There are robots who have minds despite being made of inanimate machine parts and there are also inanimate machines, and this does not feel weird. There's even a snowman that comes to life and somehow has a robust preexisting social life despite having just been born, yet none of this is weird or unbelievable or unsettling to me; the movie is so exquisitely and convincingly made, that it's easy to buy into every mesmerizing frame. The movie is sexless and (largely) genderless and very much kid friendly, yet the love felt between the two main characters is one of the most heartfelt and human portrayals of a romantic friendship that I've ever seen depicted on film. ELEMENTAL is a colossal failure, and that has nothing to do with my inability to enjoy the genre.

In general, I consider anachronisms and other goofs a source of trivial amusement, not negative criticism. SICK's entire raison d'etre, however, is to be "a slasher movie about the height of the covid pandemic," so it seems a bit more essential that it actually get those details right. Without its commentary on covid paranoia, this movie would just be a very hollow, cliche, and unrealistic slasher film. Yet this "period film" does such a bad job of historical accuracy despite being made in such close proximity to the era it's trying to reflect. Years from now, people will watch this movie and assume that it somewhat accurately reflects the atmosphere of spring 2020. Obviously, they will know this satirical thriller is not a "historical document," but that won't stop scholars of the future from falsely assuming that its depiction of grocery store shopping, etc., is realistic. It is not.

In 2020, our routines so rapidly shifted from unprecedented to urgently necessary to obsolete that it's easy to forget exactly what we were doing during any particular snapshot in time. This film blurs those changes together in a sloppy way resulting in plot holes. In the first week of April, people were still cobbling together what they could to make masks. I, who very much took covid seriously from the beginning of the stay-at-home orders, would have still been wearing a combination of an old disposable painting mask and a bandana. The medical facemasks ubiquitously seen in the film took longer to enter widespread use, nor do I think they were ever so consistently and appropriately worn even in the most rigidly controlled environments, where you would still expect to see at least one person wearing a mask loosely hanging below the nose. This inaccuracy immediately made the first sequence difficult to believe for me, which was additionally complicated by the fact that when the character's TV turns onto a live newscast, it says 5:03pm despite it being full on nighttime from the start of the film, an impossibility anywhere in the United States in the first week of April. Later in the film, we see covid rapid tests that didn't even exist until months later, being used in a manner that isn't realistic to produce results that make no sense given the timeline of exposure being discussed. (These last details could be explained as character errors, but still.)

All of these mistakes could be forgiven if the film otherwise provided a trenchant examination of our pandemic-era mindset. Unfortunately, it does not. The final act yields some darkly humorous conflict that I won't spoil here, but otherwise this movie does not resemble anything at all the experience and horror of the disruptions and death tolls of 2020. In fact, this movie seems like it was made by someone decades in the future making a best guess about what covid was like. There's no actual insight to be found.

On top of that, the film is overall just hard to swallow. The performances are all questionable, and the screenplay is absurd. There's one random scene about an urban legend in which one character randomly cites the Folklore Index off the top of her head--a scene which I suppose was meant to provide some realism and character depth since it adds nothing to the themes of the film, yet which fails to do even that because of how unrealistically it's all delivered. Characters who should be dead miraculously aren't. Characters who should be afraid and trying to survive instead do completely unlikely things. This whole movie is a mess.

I was disappointed by director John Hyams's previous horror film, ALONE (2020), but thought that he at least had potential. In that film, after all, the behaviors of the killer and the would-be victim are refreshingly realistic and unpredictable despite some other glaring plot holes and deficiencies. Unfortunately, this film makes me lose all interest in seeing what Hyams has to offer in the future.

I was astonished to learn, via IMDB's Trivia page, that the filmmakers had spent seven years writing, storyboarding, planning, and filming this movie. It does not look like much organization or forethought went into making this movie. The screenplay and plot seem largely improvisational, some half-baked concepts cobbled together during the first months of the COVID lockdown.

Here are some of the many things that fell flat for me:

Director Dean Fleischer-Camp's role as a newly divorced man trying to figure out single life? That seemed like a backstory that was simply slapped on in order to justify the character hanging out in an AirBnB for an extended period. The fact that Dean is the movie's actual director and that he was actually married to Jenny Slate, the voice and co-creator of Marcel the Shell, and that they underwent an actual divorce during the making of this film: well, that just seemed improbable! The movie's treatment of divorce seemed tacked on, superficial, and extraneous. The backstory involving Thomas Mann and Rosa Salazar as two homeowners who broke up in a flashback likewise seemed insubstantial--more about putting the machinations of the plot in place rather than providing an actual exploration of the contours of a breakup.

Director Dean's unwillingness to open up in front of Marcel or the cameras? A hint of depth that never goes anywhere, even when the 60 Minutes interview gives them a perfect opportunity to dive into this character arc.

Marcel's longing for community? Well, that was a headscratcher. In theory, I very much liked this theme, but when the community was finally reunited at the end, the artistic choices about how to present this reunion made me feel like the whole theme was pretty minor. Most of Marcel's family and friends barely seem to have even noticed that he was gone, including his own father and (to a lesser extent) his mother. The film barely gives us a glimpse of what it means to be back in this community, and what it shows us is surprisingly disturbing. Watching the whole crew devour a loaf of bread conjured up images of vermin and infestation for me; the happy ending gave me a feeling of revulsion. The fact that the reunited community included things like peanut shells and Chex cereal pieces was also baffling. If all these inanimate things were just as capable of becoming sentient as the seashells, then what are the odds that Marcel would be all alone in this house? I know I shouldn't be thinking too hard about the parameters of this world's scientific reality, but that final reunion was not the happy ending I would have hoped for.

Marcel's disappointment over his online fans is also surprisingly paper thin and stereotypical. Undoubtedly, most fans would just use Marcel's virality as an excuse to record TikToks of them dancing in his lawn, as is depicted in this film. But an audience of millions of people is likely to include a handful of amateur online investigators like myself who would thrill at the possibility of solving Marcel's mystery. In fact, I'm sure I would have been able to solve the mystery in about fifteen minutes, and I question why Dean was unable. Property deeds are available to the public. As is facial recognition software. The mystery at the heart of this film makes no sense.

It wasn't all worthless, though. Marcel's relationship with his nana Connie (Isabella Rossellini giving a fabulous voice performance) is the only plotline/theme explored in the film that actually has depth, meaning, and believability. There are likewise a number of good laughs throughout the film, and the miniature production design is clever, whimsical, and memorable. At one point Marcel serves a single Pepperidge Farm goldfish that looks to be the size of a turkey on a silver platter that is in fact a dime. Touches like that are magical, and the props alone make the movie worth seeing.

Perhaps the themes about divorce, intimacy, and community mean more to the filmmakers than they do to the audience. I wish I'd been able to get something out of the film's exploration of these themes, but they seemed to me to have been hastily cobbled together. I recommend this movie, but it might have been better if it were only 40 minutes long.

The only way this movie works for me is if you accept that Mare and Lee (Taylor Russell & Timothy Chalamet) are deluded, egotistical, awful people and if, furthermore, that is somehow the whole point. That would be an accurate portrayal of many instances of teenage love, so that very well could be director Luca Guadagnino's point. The film is masterfully made--at least for the first 90 minutes or so--and I want desperately to justify that it is a brilliant masterpiece. However, I fear that this reading may not actually be the point and that the movie is actually a steaming hot mess. Let me explain.

The previous collaboration between Guadagnino and Chalamet was CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, a gay romance between two self-assured young bisexual men who ultimately weren't quite right for each other yet wanted the power of their physical intimacy to prevail nonetheless. (Let's set aside the real-life accusations of fetishistic cannibalism against romantic co-lead Armie Hammer as being, perhaps, irrelevant to the cast at hand.) Clearly, then, the director and the male star of this film have a history of making complex depictions of queer attraction, and I think it's no stretch to say that this film is also extremely gay by the standards of, say, 1982 rural Kentucky.

Right before our first graphic, startling glimpse of flesh-eating, young Mare, having slipped out of the sight of her overprotective father (Andre Holland), is nestled with her high school best girl friend, cocooned between carpet and coffee table, sharing intimate secrets of grief and childhood trauma. Mare smells her friend's neck, appears to detect something she likes, and then snuggles closer. It is, almost certainly, the prelude to a first regretful kiss, happening right within eyesight of two other girls who are most certainly not feeling the amorous vibe. Without thinking, Mare sucks on her friend's finger, gnaws it to the mangled bone, and initiates the film's horror: screaming, fleeing from the police, self-hatred, questing for signs and understanding and escape.

It's hard not to see her story as one of self-loathing homophobia, set against the backdrop of Reagan's Bible Belt to a soundtrack of conservative talk radio amidst the specter of an AIDS--err, Gay-Related Immune Deficiency--crisis of which we must never speak.

Scrawny, dyed-mullet Lee, simultaneously proud yet insecure about his 140-pound-soaking-wet body, represents the possibility of a normal--i.e., straight--life for these two, but then why does he insist on wearing that flashy shirt that his younger sister says makes him look like a "f**got"? His choice to prey on a blatantly homosexual young carnie seems exactly like something a gay-baiting homophobe would do, but then, who actually jerks off to climax the gay victim that they're about to bash? And, more importantly, how does Mare manage to witness this and then say absolutely nothing about it afterward? Is it so meaningful that merely invoking its truth would destroy them both?

I'm getting ahead of myself. BONES AND ALL is a story about a young cannibal trying to figure out an ethical practice of cannibalism in a world that is built for non-cannibals and that would rather pretend that cannibals do not exist or can somehow be sectored off from the rest of society. Her first lessons in this, after being abandoned by a father who's come to accept that this isn't just an awful phase that his daughter is going to grow out of, comes from Sully, a Leatherstocking cosplayer embodied by Mark Rylance with mesmerizing, lived-in idiosyncrasy. Sully is weird in the way that all old strangers are weird to teenagers. He's additionally weird because he, well, eats human beings, which is something Mare has never encountered in real life before aside from her own indiscretions. Using his heightened sense of smell, like some gnarly turkey vulture, he tracks down elderly folk who are already on the verge of death and passively waits for them to cross the threshold so that he can feast on meat that is as fresh and ethically sourced as possible. (At least, he says, that's how he tries to do it most of the time.) This, it seems, is about as moral as cannibalism can be within this world, assuming that cannibalism is, like vampirism or lycanthropy, something that born-eaters cannot fully control or expunge.

But wait, is that true? Is it something they have to do, or is it more like a heroin addiction that they don't have the self-control (or what have you) to resist succumbing to? At one point, an eerie Michael Sthulbarg (more on him in a moment) calls Lee a "junky." But then, don't many proponents of ex-gay conversion liken homosexuality to a sinful addiction? A gay person can of course live a celibate life devoid of all romance, but should they have to? Is that a fulfilling life? Is a gay life necessarily harmful and self-harmful, as mid-twentieth-century psychologists were arguing, or is it only harmful if society makes it so?

This movie makes it so easy to get off track! I'm about to start arguing that Christ would not have condemned my marriage to my husband, yet I'm doing that within the context of people who literally murder and consume the bodies of actual gay people. Why is it that Mare has no problem with Lee killing and robbing the gay carnie until the moment she realizes that he has a wife and baby at home? Does his life have no value until he shows glimmers of being heteronormative? And why is it that young, brooding, looks-just-like-sex-icon-Timothee-Chalamet Lee is someone who's okay in her book, despite literally travelling the country murdering and robbing people, whereas old, smelly Sully is immediately dismissed as "creepy" despite trying to live an ethical yet fulfilled life? Why is it that Mare is so horrified by hillbilly Michael Stuhlbarg and his traveling companion (David Gordon Green), who live a life of "bones and all" shamelessness that gives off every impression of being a star-crossed romantic entanglement? The former cop played by David Gordon Green "doesn't have to be doing this," Mare discovers with horror; he's not a born eater--he was converted into it by contagious proximity, and now he CHOOSES to eat people, which, apparently, Mare would never do if she didn't have the choice!

Again: is it a choice? Mare and Lee eat hot dogs and milkshakes throughout the movie. They're not vampires or zombies who will decay and die if they don't get the sustenance of human flesh. Mare's mother (Chloe Sevigny of BOYS DON'T CRY fame), also a born eater and the genetic reason for Mare's awful inheritance, has apparently been able to live a life (such that it is) just fine without eating people under the confines of a mental institution--although her missing hands are evidence of "self-abuse." Perhaps Mare and her lover can resist their genetic fates by simply being stronger than their parents were? Perhaps they can move to Maryland, get jobs, go to college, raise a family, eat scrambled Teflon eggs, and just "be normal"?

Everything I've explained thus far is why I believed this movie to be a masterpiece resonant with symbolism about the dangers of allegorizing sexual identity as a moral quandary reducible to choice or genetic fate. If it's a choice, then it can just as well be seen as an immoral choice. If it's genetic, then it can just as well be seen as a disability that science and medicine may one day be able to treat and/or eradicate. Perhaps it only becomes problematic because society forces it into a black-and-white fallacy. Maybe it's possible to dream and construct a different society where it isn't a problem that needs to be deciphered and solved at all. Film that with beautiful cinematography, bedeck it with gorgeously immersive 1980s production design, round it out with some brilliant performances by Russell, Rylance, Stuhlbarg, and Holland, and you've got another 10-star masterpiece from Luca Guadagnino....

Except, wait, what's that in the third act? A flashback- and exposition-heavy twist about the oft alluded to circumstances of Lee's arrest record? A declaration of love between the two beautiful young stars despite them having no chemistry, openness, or significant shared depth whatsoever? A weepy climactic monologue from a self-doubting Lee that had my husband and I later discussing all the evidence for why Chalamet might not actually be a good actor after all? The realization that Mare and Lee's rejection of Sully as a "creep" isn't just blind ageism but is instead a prescient assessment of character since Sully is indeed a murderous, rapey stalker who fully becomes a villainous monster in the film's abrupt climax? A laughable finale of sex and violence that somehow manages to evoke the Kalima scene from INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM?

I can think of few movies that fall apart so radically and so thoroughly as this one does in its final half hour. The focus of the plot in the third act, the reveal of Sully's true character at the end, and the ludicrous decision of how to structure the final moments of this film all bely any of the evocative subtext that I've analyzed throughout this review. It's almost insultingly hostile how the film rejects all the substance it has so powerfully suggested in the first two acts of the film by loudly declaring, "No! It's not about any of that at all! This movie is about superficial, hollow, YA romance cliches! Haven't you been paying attention? Chalamet and Russell are sexy! They love each other! He CRIED, for crissake, and that made her love him for the MAN he really is!"

Either that's intentional, vitriolic, audience-loathing satire on the part of the filmmakers, and this movie is the masterpiece it resembles for so long, or I'm simply spending too much time trying to justify why I wasted over two hours on a pointless pile of crap.

The many one-star reviews here provide an interesting glimpse into popular taste. Apparently, a movie about psychopathy is supposed to end with some Scooby Doo unmasking, where the crazed maniac who has just murdered the entire cast unmasks himself and reveals some perfectly reasonable, linear motivation for his behavior which, upon looking back, the viewer will realize has been cleverly foreshadowed by the filmmakers all along. This is the convention--oh, so that's what caused all this mayhem!--and of course it's sometimes satisfying, but more often than not it renders the film cheap, tidy, and forgettable. And the lengths filmmakers will go to in order to sufficiently shock you--the red herrings, the duplicitous sociopath best friends--is often quite awful. It's been decades since I saw the original BONE COLLECTOR movie, but I'll never forget my bafflement and utter disappointment when the big twisty reveal happened and all I and my companion could think was, "Who the heck is that?" Honestly, it would have been better if the killer had just been a random person.

Which, I'm pretty sure, is how serial murder often works. The idea that some narrative bow is going to tie everything up at the end of a bloodbath is, well, disrespectful to the victims of the unfortunate number of real-life bloodbaths this country bears witness to. Sometimes people are just violent and deranged and like to watch people suffer, and though they probably have reasons for their behavior, that behavior probably has little or nothing to do with their victims. Would it have made things better if you learned at the end of THE RENTAL that the killer was the caretaker's brother, and that he had been cheated on by his wife, and that that's why he murdered anyone any time he witnessed a sexual transgression? Would that make it okay? Would that make their murders sensible and satisfying?

That said, this isn't a great movie. I like the fresh, anarchic randomness of the conclusion, and Toby Huss and Jeremy Allen White are standouts in the cast, but the screenplay suffers from some implausible depictions of psychology and behavior--which is to say, too often the characters make choices that just seem terribly stupid and unnatural, and it seems like they only do what they do because the plot demands it and not because actual people would behave that way.

So, yes, this was neither an excellent nor an awful way to spend 89 minutes, but anyone suggesting that a review of more than 4 stars is a "paid promotion" has an extremely narrow view of what a movie is allowed to be like.