Spare a little sympathy for the cannibals of Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All. They’re stuck in a sticky situation: when everyone’s a killer, who do you trust? Maren (Taylor Russell) is a young woman possessed by an ungodly hunger. She’s been abandoned by her father (André Holland), who leaves her with nothing but a tape cassette and the promise that, though he didn’t love her as a father should, at least he didn’t hate her. She has no memories or photos of her mother, the one who passed down this ravenous impulse. So Maren has to make her own way through the world, forging uneasy alliances with the other cannibals who cross her path.
What follows is a road trip movie of both vast, quixotic yearning and sickly claustrophobia. It’s as beautiful as it is ugly, a full-force fusion of Guadagnino’s last two films, Call Me by Your Name and his remake of Suspiria. It’s a love story, in part. Mostly, it tries to understand how someone can live on when they see themselves only as an abomination.
