All good romance movies need a meet-cute, the moment when our heroes bump into each other for the first time and fall head-over-heels in love. In Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, Bones and All, which is out in cinemas now, Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) meet in a supermarket aisle. She’s shoplifting, he’s feeling peckish. When Maren gets into a fight with a fellow shopper, Lee takes the man outside, and then, in a nearby building, kills and eats him. It is an irresistible entrée. At the sight of a blood-spattered Lee, Maren is both disgusted and lovestruck: a potent, timeless mix.
They are cannibals – or to use the film’s parlance, “eaters” – on the move in suburban America. Maren, abandoned by her father (André Holland) after biting off a friend’s finger at a sleepover, is trying to track down her mother (played by Chloë Sevigny, who gets a small but memorably creepy role). In her travels, she meets Sully (a superbly ominous Mark Rylance), an experienced eater who gives her a crash course in the community, and quickly emerges as the film’s villain (and in a film about cannibals, to be a villain, you have to be pretty bad). She soon hooks up with Lee, and they embark on a road trip together. Their journey is both mundane and tumultuous. They ride ferris-wheels, they stop for petrol, they accidentally eat someone who has a family.
The film is based on Camille DeAngelis’ young adult novel of the same name, and those genre roots are very obvious, in both the outsiders’ narrative (do you ever feel more alone than when you’re a teenager?) and also the sentimentality (the script is laden with tropes of first loves, which will either feel appropriately romantic or cringeworthy, depending on your age). But it’s also a horror film – there are some gory, turn-away-from-the-screen moments and a constant undercurrent of doom – as well as a road trip movie. Guadagnino has a lot of fun with genre-hopping here, and part of the film’s charm is that you never know if you’re in for a sappy scene or a bloody one (and it’s very often both).
It is also, unmistakably, the ‘80s: a cassette player is part of the film’s narrative structure, people use maps not apps to get around, Chalamet’s dark hair has been dyed reddish pink and styled into a mullet. There is some background noise about Reaganomics, and Maren and Lee cut an obviously awkward figure against the all-American landscape. It would be easy to see the cannibalism as an analogy for any number of concepts: being queer (at one point, Lee seduces a man before having sex with him in a field), or the difficulties of being young and different (the couple settle into a picturesque, but ultimately short-lived, existence in a college town).
The most compelling interpretation is the most obvious: this is a film about cannibals and, surprisingly, they don’t always get the greatest press in cinema. The leading figure is, of course, Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer most famously brought to life by Anthony Hopkins in 1991’s Silence of the Lambs (still the only horror film to win Best Picture at the Oscars). Is Bones and All likely to prompt a wave of cannibal clones? I would not be surprised, as the film is such an enjoyable variation on a potentially tedious theme; neither schlocky horror nor uncomfortably exploitative (see: Netflix’s recent series on Jeffrey Dahmer). Maren and Lee are cannibals of a different kind; the former ums and ahs about some ethical ambiguities (one of the film’s less compelling plot points), the latter steals cars, gets drunk and seduces everyone in sight.
It’s not hard to understand why Chalamet steals the show (though Russell, who has become a fashion favourite during this film’s promotional tour, seems set for a starry future). At only 26, the floppy-haired actor has stolen hearts in coming-of-age tales (Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird), adaptations of classics (Little Women) and blockbuster fare (the ongoing Dune franchise). In Bones and All, he pushes that heartthrob energy to its absolute limit, daring you to like someone who would like to eat you. On the one hand, there’s the flesh-eating. On the other, there’s all the things you love about Chalamet: the hair, the clothes, the boisterous gait. He almost makes that proposition redundant. Perhaps the only place to go after winning hearts, is eating them right out of people.
'Bones and All' is out now in cinemas. This article was first published on Esquire UK.
