BONES AND ALL
Cert 18 ★★ In cinemas now
There have been plenty of sexy vampire movies but you might find the fine young cannibals in this bizarre road movie a lot harder to stomach.
Adapted from Camille DeAngelis’ young adult novel, Bones And All is Twilight meets Bonnie and Clyde with photogenic flesh-eaters replacing the bank robbers and blood suckers.
Maren (Taylor Russell) has been understandably abandoned by her father who had his fill of covering up her grisly crimes.
While travelling across America to track down her estranged mother, the 18-year-old discovers she isn’t the only one with an irrepressible hunger for human flesh.
After sniffing her out at a bus stop, creepy, pony-tailed cannibal Sully (Mark Rylance) tells her there are “more of us than you think” and teaches her how to find members of this secret community using the cannibal’s sensitive sense of smell.
While he claims to eat only the recently deceased, the next cannibal she meets lives by a very different set of rules.
The frequently shirtless Lee (Timothee Chalamet) murders then scoffs rude people. It’s a highly questionable code which would turn the London Underground into a rush-hour buffet. But Maren, possibly smitten by Lee’s gender-fluid charms, joins him on a road trip across the Midwest.
On the way, the film serves up romance, melodrama and tragedy with regular interludes of gut-churning gore. For this film to work, you have to buy into the idea of sexy cannibals. I didn’t swallow any of it.