A story of first love between Maren, a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee, an intense and disenfranchised drifter; a liberating road odyssey of two young people coming into their own, searching for identity and chasing beauty in a dangerous world that cannot abide who they are.
Man, somebody just crown Luca Guadagnino the best there is in broken hearts. He’s unparalleled in making us fall in with love someone’s love. To pair that sensibility with his latest veer into horror, you’ve got a film that meshes its two ideas uncomfortably well. Like if someone made an A24 indie romance travel film, except they’re cannibals. I loved “Bones and All” for having the gall to make us fall in love with these two violent heroes and for grossing me out simultaneously.
Taylor Russell plays Maren Yearly. When we meet Maren, she sneaks out to go to a slumber party with her new friends. It doesn’t take long to discover why Maren and her dad move so often. One morning Maren wakes up to find her father gone. He’s left her some cash, her birth certificate, and a tape dictating his reasons for leaving. This sets Maren on a journey to find her long-lost mother to understand what makes her devour human flesh. On the way, she meets Lee, played by Timothée Chalamet, a fellow “eater.” The two travel the Midwest together, meeting other cannibals, devouring carnies, and falling deeply in love.
It’s a pleasantly meandering film. The narrative throughline holds the film together but gives them enough breathing room to dig into the road trip at the heart of it all. It’s shot beautifully around the rural American countryside, never once visiting a familiar town. Small-town Americana looks so gorgeous in this movie. The camera alternates between sharp, precise movements during intense sequences and long languorous zooms or not moving at all. Never have the hills of Nebraska looked so delightful.
Chalamet’s presence in this film might lift its visibility enough to draw a larger crowd, which is excellent, but this is Taylor Russell’s film. Their romantic entanglement happens so clearly as she fumbles from baby cannibal into full-blown Juliet to Chalamet’s Romeo. The film bears a lot of empathy for the two as they struggle to find a place for themselves in it. Russell gets the lion’s share of the drama scenes as she pieces together her history of violent delights. She’s at once wounded and naïve but also curious and intrigued.
The romance is at the center of this film, and it’s not afraid to interrogate its character’s pasts as it digs deeper, but the two stars make us care deeply about their love. The chemistry between the pair is off the charts, and Chalamet sinks so deeply into his role that you forget he’s the current teenage heartthrob. It speaks to his ability to act and that we never lose sight of either character. That dialed-back pairing makes them such a perfect couple. The trauma of needing to eat people (and it is a need, as the movie explains) brings them together. Counter to Mark Rylance’s deeply unsettling performance (which reminded me eerily of his role in “Ready Player One” more than anything else, weirdly enough), Chalamet’s Lee comes off as a downright hero.
The film knows how to pull its punches and makes its sanguine encounters count. My final shoutout to the special effects team for stringing together a few perfectly staged scenes for actors to chew their way through each other’s bodies. While I was disgusted at watching one person eat another person’s nipple off, part of me wondered what they did to accomplish that effect as it felt so convincing. Cannibalism comes across as genuinely terrifying at times but qualified by its necessity. It’s perfectly paired to make us as morally conflicted as Maren is.
In the end, Guadagnino’s intent on telling the whole story. No life as a cannibal is an easy life. Their times of the wandering end, and the past will catch up to our young stars. It says something that the moment I remember best from this movie is just those two actors lying in a field telling us about their most profound trauma. I could not be more impressed that I cried in a film about cannibals who fall in love. It’s violent. It’s tender. It’s soft. It’s intense. This has been one of my favorites to watch by far, and it’ll gross out plenty of people, but if you can stomach (haha) the grosses elements, you’ll find plenty of romance to adore and revere.
“Bones and All” recently premiered at the 2022 Fantastic Fest
