Bones And All is an extravagant and outrageous movie: scary, nasty and startling in its warped romantic idealism. It is also about poverty and homelessness, the ruthlessness of survival and the secret shame of that special sort of hunger that stays with you even when you do survive. Nor is it simply a YA metaphor for rebellion and marginalisation and dissenting identity politics, mischievously designed for a young audience who have probably embraced veganism. The flesh-eating compulsion portrayed in Bones and All is very different from the cannibalism of Hannibal Lecter, which is far more cynical and worldly. Lee and Maren’s cannibalism has something bizarrely innocent about it – and Guadagnino’s achievement is to provoke us with this wild absurdity and yet sell it to us, to persuade us to believe they are outlaw victims of fate, like Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Terrence Malick’s Badlands. She and Lee manage to make a life together in the straight world, yet there is a dark shadow in their carnivore romance: a creepy old “eater” called Sully, played by Mark Rylance, who inducts Maren into the way of the cannibal and has further gourmand designs. Unlike Bella and Edward in Twilight, there is no question of refraining from sex, but Maren is nonetheless horrified by what Lee is prepared to do to get his fix and horrified at what she finds out about her mother. Maren is to fall in love with a wiry, fragile, beautiful runaway called Lee, played by Timothée Chalamet in his delicate, cheekbones-and-all style. Their ethos is never to eat one of their own and it is from them that Maren learns of the ultimate cannibal experience, to eat someone completely: bones and all. Along the way, she finds there are other secret cannibals, “eaters” or “feeders” (who use a phrase redolent of Tod Browning’s classic Freaks: “one of us”). And when her dad abandons her on her 18th birthday, Maren heads off on a mission to find her mom, to find out who she is and why she does this. At that point, Bones and All becomes a tale of two starve-crossed lovers, as Maren seeks to better understand her history by searching for the mother who abandoned her, while Lee separately. Maren is in fact a cannibal, and her terrible addictive compulsion has kept her and her dad on the run for years.

Bones and all book review