Bones and All is the sweetest, softest, most romantic film about emotionally damaged cannibals you’re ever likely to see—and if that sentence makes you flinch and lean in at the same time, you’re exactly its target audience. Luca Guadagnino takes what could’ve been an edgy gimmick (“they eat people, but it’s artsy”) and instead crafts a tender, melancholy road movie about hunger: for love, for belonging, for flesh. Sometimes all three at once.
Love in the Time of Extreme Dietary Requirements
At the center is Maren Yearly, played with heartbreaking openness by Taylor Russell. From the very first sleepover finger-chomp, Maren is less a “monster” and more a walking question mark: What do you do when the worst thing about you is also the most fundamental? Her father, Frank, loves her and is utterly horrified by her, which is a fun combo for a developing psyche. His recorded confession—explaining her past “incidents” and then just… leaving—might be one of the most brutal break-up tapes in cinema.
Russell plays Maren as someone who’s almost numb from constantly trying to manage other people’s terror. There’s a quietness to her that makes every moment of joy or curiosity feel like sunlight cracking through boarded-up windows. She’s not proud of what she does, but she’s also not a self-flagellating martyr. She’s just tired and hungry and very, very alone.
Enter Lee.
Timothée Chalamet’s Lee is the type of boy you definitely should not date and absolutely would anyway. Stringy, bleached hair, thrift-store glam, denim, and the emotional stability of a firework. He’s charming, wounded, and very much an “eater” like Maren—except he’s learned to weaponize his monstrosity. He chooses who to kill with a certain grim logic: abusers, creeps, people who “deserve it.”
Chalamet’s performance balances feral volatility with surprising tenderness. Lee isn’t a cool, endlessly competent antihero; he’s a traumatized kid improvising his morality in real time, one corpse at a time. Together, he and Maren feel like two strays who’ve finally found someone who doesn’t recoil. It’s messed up. It’s beautiful. It’s messed up because it’s beautiful.
Cannibals, But Make It Midwest Indie
One of the slyest things about Bones and All is how unshowy it is about its horror. Yes, people get eaten. Yes, occasionally in graphic, wet detail. But Guadagnino shoots America like it’s the actual monster: endless highways, forgotten towns, sad carnivals, houses that feel like they’re rotting from the inside out. The ‘80s setting isn’t neon and big hair; it’s peeling wallpaper and Reagan-era despair.
The cannibalism ends up feeling like just another symptom of a country quietly consuming itself. Our two young lovers hitchhike through landscapes full of half-finished lives, bad fathers, and cheap beer. They’re not gothic creatures of the night—they’re broke, transient kids with a medical-adjacent curse and no support network. It’s almost rude how relatable it is.
Sully: The Creepy Uncle of Cannibalism
Then there’s Sully. Mark Rylance plays him like a southern-fried scarecrow possessed by a children’s clown and a serial killer at the same time. He’s an older “eater” who tracks Maren by smell, which is already alarming, and then introduces her to his whole personal ethos: never eat another eater, always bring a rope of hair from your victims as a keepsake, speak in a whisper that feels like it should come with a restraining order.
Rylance is absolutely phenomenal here. Sully is pitiable and terrifying in the same breath—a warning of what Maren could become if loneliness and obsession calcify into something rotten. He insists he’s being kind, that he understands her, that he’s the only one who really can. Anyone who’s ever dealt with a manipulative older “mentor” in a tight-knit subculture will get a queasy jolt of recognition—Sully just adds cannibalism and more taxidermy than is strictly healthy.
Every time he reappears, the film’s romantic cocoon tears open and you’re reminded that there are worse things than being alone, and one of them is being “understood” by someone like him.
Families, But Mostly as Warnings
Bones and All is packed with supporting characters who show the many ways people fail each other. André Holland as Frank, Maren’s father, is haunted and fragile, clearly broken by years of running from the law and his own child’s appetites. David Gordon Green and Michael Stuhlbarg show up as the world’s worst road-trip companions: a cop and a fellow eater with a dynamic that screams “true crime podcast” more than “support network.” Their casual evil—choosing to eat, rather than being compelled—disgusts Maren and Lee precisely because it removes the excuse of compulsion.
Chloë Sevigny as Maren’s mother, Janelle, is a brief but devastating presence. When Maren finds her, Janelle has literally eaten her own hands. If you’d like a tight, visual summary of “this condition ruins lives,” that’ll do it. Her letter, essentially telling Maren she’d be better off dead, is the emotional version of a gut punch. It’s not that Janelle doesn’t love Maren—she does. She just sees no future where they are anything but hazards to themselves and others.
Even Lee’s backstory—his abusive father, his little sister Kayla left behind—threads the same needle. This is a world where adults repeatedly fail to protect children, where trauma passes down like a bloodline, where sometimes the only “solution” is unthinkable. The cannibalism almost starts to look like a personalized coping mechanism from hell.
Romance, But With Teeth
For all its gore and grimness, this movie is, at its core, a romance. Not a quirky “we’re so weird together” Instagram kind of romance, but a “we see each other’s worst and stay anyway” kind. Maren and Lee genuinely make each other better, or at least less destructive, even as they drag each other deeper into situations normal people would describe as “a crime spree.”
Guadagnino shoots their connection with warmth and patience: long shots of them walking side by side, quietly sharing music, napping in the back of stolen vehicles, washing blood off each other in crappy bathrooms. We see them try to invent a moral code, fail at it, try again. When they talk about maybe having a normal life, it’s both absurd and heartbreakingly sincere. Of course they want a future where they’re not constantly doing dental work on strangers’ femurs. Who wouldn’t?
The final stretch in Ann Arbor—Maren shelving books in a college store, Lee cooking, the two of them playing house—is almost cruel in how normal it looks. For a moment you can almost pretend this is a coming-of-age drama about two sad kids who moved in together too young. Then Sully shows up like the worst landlord imaginable, and reality bleeds back in.
The Ending: “Eat Me” as Love Language
By the time Lee is mortally wounded and asks Maren to eat him “bones and all,” the phrase has gathered a heavy resonance. Earlier in the film, it’s described as an almost mythical act: consuming everything, leaving nothing behind. To Jake, the feral eater they meet on the road, it’s some transcendent, messed-up escalation of their condition. To Lee, at the end, it’s something else: a request for total intimacy.
It’s disturbing, obviously. It’s also weirdly moving. For two people whose entire lives revolve around unwanted hunger, this is the only way Lee can imagine giving himself completely, freely, without shame. It’s a final act of trust and surrender, and the film plays it with devastating sincerity.
You don’t have to be on board with the literal act to appreciate the emotional metaphor: loving someone so much you’d let them see and consume the darkest part of you. It’s the ultimate “no backsies” relationship move.
Final Thoughts: Beautiful, Horrible, Hungry
Bones and All is not for everyone. If the idea of sympathetic cannibals makes you see red (and not in the fun, arterial way), you may want to sit this one out. But if you can handle the carnage, what you get is a haunting, strangely tender film about outcasts trying to build something soft in a world that keeps insisting they’re monsters.
It’s beautifully shot, perfectly acted, and darkly funny in the way only a movie about two awkward young lovers sharing a corpse picnic on the side of the highway can be. Beneath the gore and the gutting, it’s asking a simple, brutal question: if someone knew the worst thing about you—the thing you’re sure makes you unlovable—could they still love you, bones and all?
In this movie, the answer is yes. It just comes with a very messy clean-up.
