Starring Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance

Directed by Luca Guadagnino

Warner Bros., in cinemas now

A shy teenage girl is deserted by her father and forms a tender relationship with a young drifter as she tries to unravel the secrets of her past, but there’s a twist…

It’s not a spoiler to say that in this tale of first love on the backroads of the Southern Midwest, the USP is that the young sweethearts in question are cannibals, or ‘eaters’ as the film chooses to call them, with an uncontrollable hunger for human flesh, fresh off the titular bone. It’s important to say so, because you really don’t want to wander into the cinema thinking you’re about to get 130 minutes of mildly troubled teen romance, as the publicity for at least one major cinema chain suggests, omitting their graphic dietary predilections altogether.

The first hour and a half of Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All is up there with the best ninety minutes of cinema I can remember. The problem is that it goes on for another forty.

The set-up of this movie is truly wonderful. When Maren (Taylor Russell) finds herself on her own, her father having decided he can’t handle the whole cannibalistic daughter thing, she sets off across 1980s America in search of her mother, hoping to finally understand who she is. This plays out as a social realist road movie reminiscent of classic auteur cinema such as Terence Mallick’s Badlands. When Maren encounters another not-so-fine young cannibal, Lee (Timothée Chalamet), fans of Mallick’s classic will find themselves remembering Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen on a similar journey through lost America back in 1973. It also owes an oblique debt to John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, the original tale of America’s unwanted crossing a hostile wilderness in search of a home they will never find.

On her journey, Maren encounters Sully (Mark Rylance, looking oddly alpine) a lonely ageing survivor of the ‘eater’ subculture, who teaches her a few ground rules, but may, or may not, have more dubious intentions.

What is so compelling about Bones and All is that, at heart, it’s not horror at all, rather a grinding, matter-of-fact tale of addiction and poverty amongst the dispossessed, with cannibalism acting as an almost Swiftian cipher. When the poor have nothing, the only thing left is for them to consume each other. It’s a brilliant subtext and pins you to your seat, played with sincerity and riveting emotional truth by Russell, Chalamet and Rylance.

Normally I love a well-structured circular story, but this movie is at its best when it’s linear and episodic. When it lurches into a dramatic resolution in its final third, the narrative gearbox starts to crunch horribly. I haven’t read Camille DeAngelis’s original novel but a quick Google explained why I found screenwriter David Kajganich’s changes so unsatisfying.

While we are definitely waiting for Mark Rylance to pop up again (although hopefully not wearing his blood-soaked ‘legacy’ underwear), when he does, it feels contrived and bolted on. More crucially, however, the movie asks you to take a step too far with Maren and Lee’s emotional journey. When I checked on the source material, I could see that DeAngelis’s conclusion – where the motivations are almost directly opposite to where the movie goes – is a far more convincing and truthful one.

There are also some under-explored narrative sidings, especially with regard to Lee’s sexuality. I’m not sure the back-story reveals amount to very much, nor does the movie bring the double meaning of its title together as satisfyingly as it could.

Respect to Chalamet and Russell, though. They have some dialogue, which on the page must look pretty ridiculous, but they carry it off as if their lives (and hopes of an Academy Award) depend upon it. To be fair, this is by far the best performance I’ve seen from Mr Chalamet, who is often far too anodyne for my taste, and if he gets a gong, it will be well deserved. Rylance is on top form too. He’s a mannered actor at the best of times, but that’s appropriate here and used to good effect. There’s also a terrific cameo from the wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg almost unrecognisable in a long greasy wig. But perhaps the most extraordinary performance in the film comes from Russell because she plays Maren as if there is nothing ‘extraordinary’ about her at all.

Verdict: For all that Bones and All doesn’t quite fulfil the promise of its early reels, this is a captivating, must-see, highly original movie for anyone with a stomach strong enough for that much human consumption. 7/10

Martin Jameson