An all-consuming passion

In the opening frames of Bones and All, a retiring, slightly awkward teen, Maren (Taylor Russell), accepts an invitation to an old-fashioned sleepover with a classmate. She doesn't have many friends, and judging by the run-down house she shares with her father, Frank (Andre Holland), this may be because she feels like an unworthy outsider. Frank and Maren are clearly dirt-poor. About midway through the evening, however, Maren acts on a compulsion to literally eat her friend (a finger, to be exact). When she gets home, Frank's only significant words are: "You did it again." It's not accusatory. It's not angry. It just is. The next thing you know, she and her dad are on the run.

Later, when Maren winds up on a solo search for her mother and the truth of her singular condition - she's an "eater" - she meets Lee (Timothee Chalamet, in full brood mode), another eater, and the two embark on one of those classic, outsiders-on-the-road love stories that only happen in the movies.

Director Luca Guadagnino, whose last theatrical release was Suspiria (2018), can't be accused of lacking ambition. In Bones and All, based on the book by Camille DeAngelis, Guadagnino marries the hazy, heaving sentiment of young-adult romance to the body-horror thriller. If that sounds like an uncomfortable combination, that's because it is, though not because it blends disparate genres. Mashups have been known to work flawlessly: Blade Runner (1982; film noir and science fiction), Alien (1979; sci-fi and horror), and Shaolin Soccer (2001; sports and kung fu) are just a few. The problem is in the message, or lack thereof. For all its style, and Guadagnino's tactile enveloping tone of conflicting sexuality and erupting emotion, Bones and All simply isn't a cutting-edge narrative. It has as much in common with the director's own Call Me by Your Name (2017; also costarring Chalamet) as it does with the youthful fever of Twilight (2008). We've been watching "misunderstood teens" for as long as cinema has existed.

Because of that familiarity, Bones and All needs to do a little more to push it over the edge into essential Guadagnino viewing. At his best, this is a filmmaker who strips his characters of their carefully constructed surfaces and reveals the currents running underneath, peaking perhaps with Tilda Swinton's retired rock star in A Bigger Splash (2015). And while Russell (whose biggest role to date was in 2019's less-than-challenging Escape Room) is fine as the morally and socially shaky Maren, and expresses bafflement and uncertainty quite effortlessly, she's no Swinton. The currents don't run that deep.

Still, there's something mesmerizing about Guadagnino's most basic storytelling. His ability to inject what appear to be calmness and stability with a frenzy of violence is affecting, helped along by cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan's ironically lush images. And violent it is. By taking the mystery of Maren's predilections away early on, there's no need to be coy. Guadagnino doesn't need to shy away from the gore integral to Maren and Lee's diet, or from the outliers they stumble upon, like Sully (Mark Rylance), the "helpful mentor" who disrupts the domestic bliss Maren and Lee try to settle into. Long before the inevitable blood-and-tear-soaked finale, the cannibal romance has covered the same territory we've seen in countless outlaw romances before. And at its heart, that's what Bones and All is, just with the idea of the all-consuming love affair treated a bit more literally.