For the better part of a decade, Gen Z has been salivating for a YA romance to call their own, gnawing at whatever scraps of Twilight they can find. They may have found it with Bones and All, a tender tale of two impossibly gorgeous teen cannibals who embark on a journey across the American Midwest in search of family and belonging (and warm bodies, of course).
Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino and star Timothée Chalamet have joined forces again for a coming-of-age saga of youthful amour, ennui, and despair—although this story centers 18-year-old Maren (Taylor Russell) who, after turning a girls’ sleepover into a bloodbath, is abandoned by her protective, non-anthropophagus father (André Holland) and forced to navigate 1980s America alone. With only a small stack of bills and her dad’s cassette-tape apologia guiding her, she flees rural Virginia en route to Minnesota, where her estranged flesh-eating mother, whom she hasn’t the faintest recollection of, is apparently hiding out.
Along the way she encounters Sully (Mark Rylance), a fellow cannibal whose weary, whispery voice, jacket pinned with more flair than a Chotchkie’s waiter, hunting knife, and ponytail-rope of his victims’ hair suggests he knows his way around internal organs—and is not to be trusted. He does, however, give young Maren some Obi-Wan-like pointers regarding her condition, including coping with feeding guilt and harnessing the ability to smell out a fellow neck-nibbler. The unlikely duo tag-team a dying old woman, and once her hunger is satiated, Maren runs away like a bat out of hell, hopping a bus to the next state.
It is in a roadside mini-mart that she crashes into Lee (Chalamet), a lanky, chivalrous young buck with a mane of tousled red-black curls, Prada-tier cheekbones, and runway-ready treads. They almost immediately suss out that they’re kindred spirits with matching appetites, and, after stealing a victim’s truck, introducing her to KISS (courtesy of a Chalamet dance frenzy set to “Lick It Up”), and washing the blood off, they’re back on the road to try and find Maren’s missing mama.
“I don’t know whether to cry or scream or laugh,” Chalamet mutters upon meeting Maren. From the jump it’s apparent these two lonely, wounded souls’ paths filled with abandonment have led them to each other. Chalamet has, in a rather short period of time, established himself as Hollywood’s foremost expert at conveying the ecstasy and agony of first love, while Russell, who stole the show in the otherwise ho-hum Waves, matches him beat for beat. Hers is a face that is equal parts thrilled and terrified of her cursed disorder and the violent, Bonnie and Clyde-esque future that awaits, and, captured beautifully by cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan, one that we will surely be seeing a lot of in the years to come.
Though Bones and All is, more than anything, a love story, it doubles as a travelogue of the Midwest, as Khachaturan’s camera serves up arresting wide shots of his two photogenic stars in various states of embrace amid rolling hills and plains illuminated by blood-red skies. Sometimes, it takes an outsider like Guadagnino to appreciate the beauty of Middle America.
Bones and All hits the occasional speed bump over the course of its 130-minute odyssey where Guadagnino leans too heavily into the gore, as when Lee, needing new wheels, seduces a closeted man at a county fair, or its drawn-out denouement (it still never approaches the level of Raw). And Chalamet’s cannibal fits do border on the absurd, such as a pair of distressed knee-ripped baggy jeans that are more TikTok than technicolor. But its charms far outweigh its foibles, like Michael Stuhlbarg hamming it up as a grimy, overall-sporting backwoods people-eater and the score by the Social Network team of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, casting the proceedings in a cocoon of gloom.
The timing of the film also raises concerns. Bones and All was officially announced on Jan. 28, 2021, nearly a month after the news broke that Guadagnino and Chalamet’s Call Me by Your Name collaborator Armie Hammer had shared his cannibal fantasies with a number of women. The trio had been deep in development on a sequel to Call Me by Your Name, which, following the disturbing allegations against Hammer, was scrapped and this project prioritized. Guadagnino and Chalamet, at a minimum, owe the public—and Hammer’s accusers—a thorough explanation as to whether there is any connective tissue here (Guadagnino has issued a vague denial).
With that being said, this adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ Alex Award-winning YA novel is a moody, achingly romantic triumph—one that will be cherished by many adolescents who feel judged, or aimless, or lost in the crowd. They’ll eat this thing up. Bones and all.
