Bones and all is a beautiful teen romance/coming of age story about a couple of very fine young cannibals. It's a road movie, a rambling character study that also manages to establish an interesting type of vampire-adjacent monster with its own idiosyncrasies and cool little details. It's heavily indebted to David Gordon Green's early, quiet, naturalistic movies set against run-down Americana (a conscious decision, as reflected in that the man himself was asked to play a character) with splashes of graphic gore and some really nasty, excellently creepy scenes.
It's a defiantly batshit crazy movie, aggressively uncommercial but released by MGM/UA. I loved it.
Highschooler Maren (Taylor Russell) leads a sheltered life with her dad (André Holland). Extremely sheltered: she's allowed to go to school, but her dad locks her in her room when he's not with her.
Maren manages to escape and goes to a sleepover with some friends, but the she loses control and almost bites one of their fingers off. Oops! She runs away back to her house, and when her father sees her covered in blood, it's clear that this has happened before, because they have a drill to clear out of town with only what they can gather up in three minutes.
Some time and a few towns later, Maren arrives home to find that her dad gone, leaving her some money, her birth certificate, and a cassette with a long message explaining why he did it. The message is played throughout the movie, but the gist of it is that he's had enough of covering for a cannibal; much as he loves her, he's out.
The birth certificate gives Maren a town and her mother's name, so she sets off to find her to see if she can make some sense of her situation.
On the road she meets Sully (Spielberg regular Mark Rylance), another 'eater', who sniffs her out and... well, invites her over for dinner. Here's where we get hints of a well-developed mythology for Maren's 'condition'. It's an ever-growing hunger, much like vampirism, but it comes with a developed sense of smell that lets them, among other things, find each other. Sully has even developed it to be able to find people who are about to die, which he claims has let him avoid having to kill anyone.
Rylance, like everyone else on this movie, gives an excellent performance, and it's unnerving to see the BFG be so unrelentingly creepy. When Maren takes off running at the earliest opportunity, it's perfectly understandable.
While shoplifting across state lines, Maren has a sort of meet-cute with another eater her age, Lee (Timothée Chalamet). She awkwardly convinces him to take her under her wing, and teen biology does the rest. The love story is sweet and oddly underplayed- or rather, it's not so much about the standard romantic scenes, but about their connection. Like the rest of the movie, unsensational and honest.
It's a loose, shaggy story that's held together by some plot threads (Maren's search for her mother, and oh shit Sully keeps popping up, somehow getting creepier every time!) but mostly it's a quiet, sensitive character study about these young lovers dealing with having such a shitty, shitty lot forced unto them.
It's a gorgeous film, with a production design that effortlessly and subtly invokes the eighties mostly without any obvious signifiers (well, except the music, which is excellent - a great selection of early eighties post-punk and an original score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross).
Luca Guadagnino's direction is unintrusive, with some interesting editing at points, and an firm command of mood, well accompanied by beautiful photography of both urban and natural landscapes.. The script is by David Kajganich, who previously had adapted Dan Simmon's The Terror for an excellent miniseries, so the great character work here should come as no surprise.
Another one that's hard to recommend, but I'll still recommend whole-heartedly.
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