Yannis Drakoulidis / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures
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 & 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.