Anybody hungry?

I found myself anything but after watching the new film, Bones and All, directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell.

Maren (Taylor Russell) was a young woman whose father kept her away from others. Soon it was revealed the reason for the isolation was an “Eater,” someone who felt the need to eat other humans. When her father left her, she took off on a mission to try and find her mother. Along the way, she met another “Eater” named Lee (Timothée Chalamet) and they travel the roads of the Midwest together facing the dangers of the world.

I did not find this movie very enjoyable at all. To be fair, both Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet do a solid job acting in this, though I was not 100% accepting of their apparent relationship. Mark Rylance was amazing as another “Eater” that Maren meets on her trek named Sully, who is a little more sinister than Lee. Rylance brought everything to the role and he was the best part of the movie.

I never accepted their relationship, nor did I buy their excuses. They kept making references to “having” to eat people, as if they needed to do so to survive, but the film keeps the details very sparse, allowing them to just do whatever the plot needed them to do. There were moments that the film implied that this was passed along genetically, but it also introduced someone who was eating people by choice.

The background of these characters were not sketched out well. At first, I thought that Maren, who had been given a tape recording by her father, would be more in depth, but that turned out to be lacking much of anything. Lee was given a backstory late in the film and it really felt tacked on. It had little to do with him either and was dismissed quickly.

The plot was played straight, but I had jokes in my head at every turn.

The film looked great and was shot well. There was plenty of gore involved in the movie, but it didn’t feel that it was that important to the overall story. At times the film focused on the cannibalism and other times it felt like it was not important to the story being told.

While it was well acted, Bones and All was just not a filling course. I guess it needed some salt.

2.2 stars