She ends up chewing the skin right off the bone like a chicken wing. Later, after sneaking out for a sleepover-and, it’s implied, a potential make-out session-with her new gal pal, Maren takes the other girl’s hand to examine her manicure. Maren tells a high school classmate that he’s overprotective, but there’s clearly something else going on. They’re tight, but dad leavens his affection with wary concern.

In a carefully designed and largely effective prologue, we meet Maren, who’s living in a trailer park in Virginia with her single father (André Holland). It’s 1988 in the American heartland, jobs are scarce, and in every small town, a few clandestine drifters lead bloodthirsty double lives, picking off loners and eating them under cover of night. No matter how much human viscera Chalamet’s Lee chows down on over the course of 130 minutes, his A-list ribcage remains visible through his scrawny torso.Ĭhalamet isn’t really the star of Bones and All: that’d be Taylor Russell (so striking a few years ago in Waves), whose 18-year-old character, Maren, provides our entry point into a slightly skewed and yet naturalistically rendered universe. The title of Camille DeAngelis’s 2015 YA novel about a pair of star-crossed, flesh-eating lovers rambling through the Reagan-era United States refers to its antiheroes’ grotesque gustatory habits, but it also works as a double entendre about its It Boy headliner. “When you’re 140 pounds soaking wet, you need to have an attitude.” So says Timothée Chalamet in Bones and All, taking one of the few intentionally funny lines in Luca Guadagnino’s ludicrous cannibal romance drama and giving it a little bit of witty, self-deprecating topspin.

Bones and all novel review