Part horror film, part coming-of-age tale, part romance, the adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ young adult novel “Bones and All” is a small marvel, unsettling and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s first project filmed in the United States, the film avoids many of the traps that befall international auteurs when they begin to work in this country. Without ever pressing too hard, he creates a portrait of 1980s small-town America being hollowed out by the forces of progress, zombie towns that leave few options for the young people growing up there.
Teenage Maren (Taylor Russell) has been abandoned by her father (André Holland), who can no longer deal with Maren’s condition of being driven to eat people. The film doesn’t belabor the specifics of this strange hunger, leaving it as a central enigma for Maren to grapple with; it makes her an outsider to society but also, in many ways, unknowable to herself. With a bit of cash, her birth certificate and a cassette tape on which her father tries to explain himself, Maren sets out in search of her mother, who she has never known.
Along the way, she encounters Sully (Mark Rylance), who has the same compulsion to cannibalism and seems eager to take her under his wing, but she prefers to travel on her own until she meets Lee (Timothée Chalamet). The two young “eaters,” as they call themselves, eventually attempt to stake out a semblance of normalcy and stability rather than staying on the road, until Sully reinserts himself into their lives.
