Telluride, Colo. — To feed or not to feed, that is the film festivalgoer's ever-pressing question: whether 'tis wiser to blow off a screening and seek out some much-needed sustenance (or a drink, or a nap), or to just power through and hope that sheer cinephile adrenaline will be fuel enough. That was more or less the dilemma I found myself in at the Telluride Film Festival, near the end of a full Saturday of screenings for which I'd foolishly neglected to pack any snacks beforehand. With limited options, I settled into a 10 p.m. show — my fourth and final movie of the day — with a packet of Starburst I'd salvaged from the theater's understandably depleted concession stand, resolving to treat myself to a proper meal the next morning.
I mention all this because it was amusing to watch "Bones and All," a strange, tender and frightening cannibal love story from the Italian director Luca Guadagnino, while trying to keep the noise of crinkling candy wrappers and my own growling stomach to a minimum. In retrospect, it may have been the ideal set of conditions for a picture that would've played differently, and I suspect less pleasantly, on a full stomach. And there's real pleasure in "Bones and All," an insistent sweetness that somehow both nourishes and cleanses away the horror. The movie, set across a broad swath of Middle America in the late 1980s, is filmed in a rougher, less polished style than Guadagnino's Italian-set dramas ("I Am Love," "A Bigger Splash," "Call Me by Your Name"), but it exerts its own earthy, dreamlike pull. It casts — and sometimes violently breaks — its own lyrical spell.
Written by David Kajganich (who also scripted Guadagnino's earlier horror outing, the 2018 remake of "Suspiria"), the story follows Maren (a terrific Taylor Russell, "Waves"), a lonely, forlorn teenager who — in a moment that's shocking, sad and hilarious at once — is revealed to be an "eater," a person with an insatiable appetite for human flesh. For years her non-eater father (a touching Andre Holland) has watched over her, moving her from town to town across the U.S. and presumably leaving a bloody trail in their wake. But at the film's outset, he abandons her, leaving her some cash and an audio-recorded message explaining that he can't look after her anymore. From now on, she'll have to figure things out on her own.
