‘Take, eat, this is my body,” said Jesus at the last supper, a line I remembered while reading Piers Paul Read’s book about the survivors of the 1972 Andes plane crash, and remembered again watching Luca Guadagnino’s new film, adapted by screenwriter David Kajganich from the YA bestseller by Camille DeAngelis – although here there isn’t quite the same transformative miracle. Bones And All is a macabre horror, an emo adventure in revulsion, a tale of young and forbidden love, and a parable for that terrible secret thought, scary but also euphoric, that enters into everyone’s head in their teen years: I am different.
We are at the tail-end of the Reaganite 80s, an era lacking the surveillance and DNA technology which, in the present day, might have taken a bite out of this movie’s plausibility. Taylor Russell plays Maren, a shy, smart kid who has just started at a new school, living on the edge of poverty with her careworn dad (André Holland). One of her new friends invites her to a sleepover, where the mood of humid, girlish intimacy excites Maren in ways her new friends could not have anticipated: she bites someone’s finger off and eats it.
