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Sounds of flesh being ravenously devoured permeate an early scene in “Bones and All.” Sparing us most of the visual horror, director Luca Guadagnino instructs the audience to look away from the grisly feeding. By pointing the camera at photographs of the victim, an elderly woman, on vacation or with her loved ones, he preserves her humanity. Though her corpse now serves as a feast for two famished cannibals, her time alive mattered.

Photographic evidence of a person’s history becomes a strong motif in this beautiful, voracious coming-of-age romance. These printed pictures, sometimes found in a car or tucked away in a drawer, provide a reminder of the many facets—for better and worse—a single individual can contain: the perpetrators were once children, while their prey may in turn leave families behind. In every bite, there’s a disturbingly intimate communion.

Ingesting people across state lines in the 1980s, Maren ( Taylor Russell ) finds herself on her own after her father runs away when she turns 18, only leaving behind a tape recounting her earliest episodes of cannibalism and her birth certificate. Their father-daughter relationship seems akin to that in the Swedish vampire drama “ Let the Right One In .” The parent, aware of her urges, tried to prevent her from further acting on such hunger.

However, Maren, now out in the open world, learns that her desire for human meat is innate, an unexplainable trait she cannot change, only control. “Eaters,” as they refer to themselves, identify one another through their scent. But while some of these outsiders have rules that make eating others like them off-limits, others follow a less scrupulous path.

Working from screenwriter David Kajganich ’s adaptation of Camille DeAngelis ’ novel, Guadagnino infuses the most gruesome aspects of the journey with an earthy atmosphere where a love story can flourish and not seem jarring. Swoon-worthy landscapes under purple skies—the heartland of America in all its raw, vast, and sparsely populated glory—become the Terrence Malick-friendly playground of conflicted lovers. Through the dexterous lens of cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan , the countryside mesmerizes.

The heartthrob at hand is Lee ( Timothée Chalamet ), an orange-haired eater who kills without remorse. He comes across Maren while on his way to Kentucky, where the remnants of his previous life remain. As p artners in crime who slowly transition into lovers fueled by youthful impetus, the two disagree on how to go about satisfying their needs.

A formidable Russell, who previously stunned in “ Waves ,” molds a performance in which Maren moves through her newly discovered horizons with both innocence and guilt. The trepidation of falling in love for the first time intermingles with the moral conundrum of her condition. In turn, her consciousness of the acts Lee rationalizes as inevitable without much thought for the dead so the two can eat creates an ideological divide.

In contrast, an infallibly charming Chalamet doesn’t stretch his emotional range much. He puts forward a familiar rehashing of other cool, but secretly tortured young men who have become a staple in his still nascent collection of roles in prestigious fare.

Then there’s the third key player in this “ Nomadland ” meets “ Raw ” trip: Sully ( Mark Rylance ), an odd eater that shows Maren the ropes at the beginning of her self-discovery as a cannibal. What renders Rylance’s supporting turn exceptional is that one never doubts Sully is a person that truly exists. There’s a lived-in quality in his bizarre mannerisms, his heavily decorated clothing, and other eccentricities. Blood-soaked, he shares with Maren the organic memento he carries around to keep track of those he has consumed.

Guadagnino’s frequent collaborator Michael Stuhlbarg and director David Gordon Green , in a rare acting part, show up for chilling cameos. They help cement “Bones and All” as an amalgamation of the Italian filmmaker’s tales of amorous complications such as “ Call Me by Your Name ” or “A Bigger Splash” and his genre sensibilities put to the test in “ Suspiria .”

Back to the significance of the photos that Lee and Maren encounter as they traverse several states over one summer: while these images reveal information on the people in them, they also lack depth and are limited in what they can tell us. That “Bones and All” opens with shots of paintings depicting landscapes that exist outside of the walls of Maren’s high school illustrates how these renditions are mere interpretations of reality. Likewise, the photos only capture a brief glimpse of a person and not who they are in full beyond the confines of that frame, and of the time it immortalizes. People change.

“Bones and All” plays out as a can’t-look-away, riveting experience for most of its running time. It’s easy to get entranced by its modestly sumptuous imagery, the believable chemistry of the volatile couple, and even the rattling bluntness of the graphic sequences.

But once the pair reaches Maren’s original destination, Minnesota, and a confrontation with a family member ensues, the film loses steam that cannot be regained from the choppy flashbacks that saturate the final act of Guadagnino’s latest. Even the heart-to-heart confessional between the flesh-eating lovebirds, where they agree to try their hand at a peacefully mundane existence, overexplains what was knowingly unspoken.

The takeaway of its metaphor, that there’s always someone out there who can empathize with one’s plight, applies to any of the reasons we may feel ostracized, desperate to leave home, or profoundly alone. Based on those philosophical preoccupations, as well as more obvious wordplay reasons, “Bones and All” could have just as easily shared a title with another fall season release: “ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed .”

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Carlos Aguilar

Originally from Mexico City, Carlos Aguilar was chosen as one of 6 young film critics to partake in the first Roger Ebert Fellowship organized by RogerEbert.com, the Sundance Institute and Indiewire in 2014.

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Bones and All (2022)

Rated R for strong, bloody and disturbing violent content, language throughout, some sexual content and brief graphic nudity.

131 minutes

Taylor Russell as Maren Yearly

Timothée Chalamet as Lee

Mark Rylance as Sully

Michael Stuhlbarg as Jake

Chloë Sevigny as Janelle Yearly

André Holland as Francis Yearly

Francesca Scorsese

Jessica Harper as Barbara Kerns

David Gordon Green as Brad

Jake Horowitz as Booth Man

Luca Guadagnino

Writer (based on the novel by)

Camille DeAngelis
David Kajganich

Cinematographer

Arseni Khachaturan
Marco Costa
Trent Reznor
Atticus Ross

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‘Bones and All’ Review: You Eat What You Are

Luca Guadagnino’s latest stars Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell as young cannibals on the run.

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In a scene from the movie “Bones and All,” Maren and Lee sit on the lowered tailgate of a blue pickup truck parked among trees.

By A.O. Scott

Anyone who travels the roads of America must sooner or later confront the question of what to eat. Do you prefer the convenience of interstate fast food or the authenticity of a local greasy spoon? For the footloose young lovers in “Bones and All,” Luca Guadagnino’s gory, ridiculous and curiously touching new film, the decision is more a matter of “who” than “what.” Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) are foodies gripped by a specific and exotic appetite. They will order pancakes in a pinch, but what they really crave is human flesh.

These fine young cannibals — they prefer the term “eaters” — are part of a subculture that haunts the margins of mid-80s Middle America, recognizing one another by smell and subtle behavioral cues. Maren has grown up under the protection of her non-eater father (André Holland), who takes off when she is 18, leaving behind an audiocassette that helps her and the audience understand her condition, which first emerged when, as a toddler, she snacked on a babysitter.

Maren learns that her mother was also an eater and sets out to find her. The journey winds from Virginia to Minnesota and beyond, by way of picturesque spots in Maryland, Ohio, Kentucky and other states. (The cinematographer, Arseni Khachaturan, favors a moody autumnal palette.) Along the way, Maren meets a few others of her kind and learns something about their ways. A middle-aged drifter named Sully (a sad and spooky Mark Rylance) teaches her how to sniff out other eaters and shows her the rope he has braided from the hair of his prey. Later, she meets Lee at a convenience store, looking on as he deals with and ingests an obnoxious customer.

Grisly as it is, “Bones and All” is less a horror movie than an outlaw romance in the tradition of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Badlands.” You’re more afraid of what might happen to Maren and Lee than of what they might do to anyone else. There is a sweetness to Chalamet and Russell that makes it hard to see them as monsters, and Guadagnino takes an empathetic, if not altogether approving, view of their tastes.

What does it mean to be an eater? The movie teases various analogies, some more palatable than others. What defines Maren, Lee, Sully and a few others (notably a gleeful predator played by Michael Stuhlbarg) is an affliction, a lifestyle and an identity. It’s something they’re born with, and something the squares (or should I say the meals) can never really understand.

Maren, openhearted and intellectually curious, wants to find an emotionally and ethically sustainable approach to cannibalism. If the compulsion to eat other people can’t be suppressed, could it somehow be managed? Individual eaters seem to make their own rules. Sully tries to seek out victims who are on the verge of death, while Lee persuades himself that his prey somehow had it coming. Maren, seeing how damaged Lee and Sully are (and uncovering the horror of her mother’s fate), dares to imagine something like happiness. Her belief in her own goodness is disarming, and Russell’s performance is fresh and unaffected. She plays Maren as the heroine of a young-adult novel.

Which she is. Guadagnino adapted “Bones and All” from Camille DeAngelis’s 2015 book of the same name, aimed at teenage readers. The movie, bloody enough for an R rating, isn’t exactly a cannibal “Twilight,” but its romanticism — its passionate commitment to its vulnerable, misunderstood misfits — is defiantly and uncondescendingly adolescent.

Guadagnino is an elusive, sometimes beguiling (and sometimes exasperating) filmmaker, by turns vulgar, philosophical and sensual. His own tastes range from vintage trash to deep-dish aestheticism, and at his best — in “A Bigger Splash,” “Call Me By Your Name” and the HBO series “We Are Who We Are” — he can combine melodramatic pop extravagance with art-house refinement.

“Bones and All” is a ragged hybrid of genres and styles, an elevated exploitation movie, a succession of moods — anxious, horny, dreamy, sad — in search of a metaphor. Or maybe the metaphor is obvious. Neither raw nor fully cooked, it might make you lose your appetite, but it’s more likely that you’ll still be hungry when it’s over.

Bones and All Rated R. Flesh and blood. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Bones and All Reviews

There is a lot to chew on here, about people who feel disenfranchised, unloved and unwanted. The ending may disappoint, but it also ensures the film will have a life as an imperfect masterpiece, the best kind of cult film, after all.

Full Review | Sep 19, 2023

Guadagnino lights up every scene in the movie with breathtaking visuals that navigate the push and pull of the love story.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2023

Desire and danger are two sides of the same coin in Bones And All, a blood-soaked romance that juxtaposes the yearning for touch with the craving for flesh. It’s a cannibal love story that tugs at the heart, even as its characters go for the jugular.

Full Review | Aug 18, 2023

Bones and All is a compelling story that can be best enjoyed when consumed in its metaphorical state.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Aug 8, 2023

Bones and All comes tantalizingly close to being an effective arterial-spray gothic romance, but it too often feels like an empty exercise in style.

Full Review | Aug 1, 2023

A fable that intertwines tenderness with the horrifying.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 25, 2023

At times “Bones and All” is heartbreaking and seductive, but even if you know going in that it’s about cannibalism, the movie is still wildly disgusting.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Bones and All is a deeply humanistic story of impossible love as two drifters search for their idea of home.

A near perfect slice of life romantic road trip film involving two cannibals. Beautiful, horrific, creepy, but all at the same time poignant.

Luca Guadagnino’s Bones And All is the story of two outsiders who are desperately trying to “be people” in a world that doesn’t seem to have room for them.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 25, 2023

A road movie with a believable romance, disgusting horror, gorgeous visuals and impeccable score, Bones and All, a movie that shouldn't work, becomes one of the best of the year.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 24, 2023

"Bones and All" uses the cannibal idea as a sign of inescapable difference, a metaphor for queerness in its most all-embracing form, and asks how we can lead fulfilling lives in a world that fears us

Full Review | Jun 6, 2023

doesn’t quite reach the twisted melodramatic heights to which Guadagnino clearly aspires, which makes Bones and All, like his Suspiria remake, more interesting as a concept than it is effective as a film.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 27, 2023

Guadagnino has crafted something unexpectedly tender, a deeply romantic and empathetic study of young love between outsiders.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 16, 2023

The answer to how you blend a story like this is that it does not taste well, cannibal or not.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Feb 14, 2023

The sort of moody melodrama that can be absorbed straight up or metaphorically.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 11, 2023

Mark Rylance lifts up the show with this creepy, older eater who tries to take Russell’s free spirit under his wing. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross put together a beautiful score and the film definitely walks to its own beat. Easier to admire than love.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Feb 8, 2023

Bones and All is a fantastic piece of work that manages to be a heartfelt romance, a compelling road trip, a grisly horror flick, and an elegiac piece of longing all at once.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 8, 2023

Bones and All is a rather odd little road film, and can be a little slow as its characters go on their journey, but thanks to its intriguing premise and a pair of captivating performances, this becomes a trip ultimately worth taking.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 30, 2023

Young love often appears in the cinema as tender, idealistic and bittersweet, but rarely terrifies and goes against the grain. In Bones and All, two young people brought together by their taste for human flesh hit all these notes in the best way possible.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 18, 2023

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‘bones and all’ review: taylor russell and timothée chalamet in luca guadagnino’s tender cannibal romance.

Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland and Chloë Sevigny also appear in this road movie debuting in the Venice competition, about young outsiders finding a home in each other.

By David Rooney

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Young lovers Lee (Timothée Chalamet) and Maren (Taylor Russell) sit in a sunny field together, each frowning into space, in Bones and All

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Bones and All finds fresh new blood in an age-old young-love story

Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet star in Luca Guadagnino’s luscious horror-tinged romance

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This review was originally published in conjunction with Bones and All’s theatrical release. It has been updated and republished for the movie’s digital release.

The urge to equate young love with doom and mortality probably goes back way beyond Shakespeare and Romeo and Juliet . It’s such a natural narrative pairing: First loves rarely last, and youth definitely doesn’t.

For most people, that burning intensity of young love — the “Everything is new and wonderful, and we’re the first people to ever experience sex” feeling of infatuation and discovery — is likely to fade quickly. And for adults looking back on that era of their lives, the sense of loss and nostalgia can feel similar to the emotions around navigating death. But the metaphor has rarely been as startlingly vivid as it is in Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All , a gory shocker that comes with plenty of familiar horror-movie elements, but plays far more like a classic road romance.

It’s a strange movie, seemingly designed to confuse both fans of Guadagnino’s previous horror-inflected feature, 2018’s messy giallo remake Suspiria , and fans of his 2017 sun-baked gay romance Call Me by Your Name. While Bones and All bridges those two movies so neatly that it feels calculated, it also raises the question of how much audience crossover there might be between the two films. Horror hounds may be disappointed by how much of the film is low-key relationship drama and coming-of-age story, low on breathless tension-building and jump scares. Romantic-drama fans are certainly going to see more bloody eviscerations than they’re used to getting in their movies. But for genre-agnostic cinephiles, the sheer daring and uniqueness of the story — an adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 YA novel of the same name — will be a major part of the draw.

Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a young man with deep eye-bags and a mop of red-dyed curly hair, sips coffee and stares confrontationally into the camera in Bones and All

Bones and All reunites Guadagnino and Call Me by Your Name star Timothée Chalamet for a second love story. But it takes a while for Chalamet to enter the picture. Initially, the film centers on Maren ( Waves ’ Taylor Russell), a high schooler with a series of secrets. Maren lives alone with her father (André Holland) in a dilapidated, disintegrating home. A furtive sense of shame hangs over all the little details of their home and their interactions, but it takes a while for the film to reveal why that’s true, and what they’re both navigating. And when the reveals do come, they’re horrifying and exhilarating at the same time, in part because the details are so unexpected.

Beyond going in prepared for tremendous amounts of blood and some brief, intense violence, Bones and All is the kind of film that’s better experienced in the moment than in descriptions. Each new revelation about Maren’s past and present is unfolded carefully, in part because she doesn’t really understand her own nature, and has to learn about it alongside the audience. Screenwriter David Kajganich (a writer-producer-developer on the much-beloved horror series The Terror ) never feels like he’s in a hurry to get to any particular part of the story. He and Guadagnino make plenty of room for Maren learning through conversations, first with new acquaintance Sully ( Bridge of Spies ’ Mark Rylance, once again disappearing into an incredible performance), then with newer acquaintance Lee (Chalamet), a world-wise boy about her age.

Viewers who don’t already know the fundamental premise of the film, and want to experience it in the theater, should stop reading right here. The early trailer and festival summaries for Bones and All were coy about what makes Maren, Lee, and others different, but public descriptions of the film have widely shared the secret: Bones and All ’s wide-eyed central couple are both “Eaters,” effectively ghouls driven to devour human flesh. Their victims don’t have to be alive, but once they’ve started consuming human bodies, they have to continue, or die. Bones and All more or less follows in the footsteps of movies from Bonnie and Clyde to Terrence Malick’s Badlands in putting a pair of pretty people on the wrong side of the law and sending them on the run, but in this case, it’s questionable how human they are. And their crimes aren’t sexy and stylish, like Bonnie and Clyde’s bank robberies or the vampiric murders in The Hunger — Guadagnino makes the consumption rituals bloody, grotesque, and animalistic, an unpleasant matter of survival.

All of which gives him more room to play when it comes to romanticizing Lee and Maren’s connection. There’s a century-old tradition of sexualizing monsters and predatory behavior , and Bones and All leans into it hard, while still building the story around the old coming-of-age patterns of protagonists finding themselves (and finding their courage in the process). Maren has a lot to navigate — a family mystery, her first love, her first understanding that there are other Eaters and rules that bind them. But above all, she has to figure out who she is in Lee’s shadow, and outside of it. He knows much more than she does about the world, and Eater life, but she knows more about what she wants, and who she hopes to be, and she has to navigate how her desires meet his understanding of the world.

Lee (Timothée Chalamet) and Maren (Taylor Russell) stand in a wide green field under a broad, bright blue sky filled with fluffy white clouds in Bones and All

Like Call Me by Your Name , Bones and All is a sensual movie, particularly visually — Guadagnino luxuriates in the kind of big-sky-country vistas that made Andrea Arnold’s similarly summer-break-themed American Honey so memorable, and he lights his leads warmly in the day and with skulking fervor at night. But it’s more remarkable for the way he and Kajganich navigate the push and pull between the story’s romantic elements and horror themes. There’s a big metaphor at play here about how parents, families, and friends enable aberrant behavior until it feels normal, and how being protected from the world can make it hard to properly enter it. And it plays in radically different ways at the same time: both through the lens of two young kids on a romantic road trip, and as two growing monsters seducing and killing other people for food.

There’s an equally complex sense of attraction and repulsion at play in Maren and Lee’s relationship. They’re very different people who rarely seem suited for each other — but they also have that central unswerving similarity in common, and the fact that neither of them knows another Eater their age pulls them together, even when they’re infuriating each other with their conflicting goals and beliefs. The filmmakers keep the questions humming with a live-wire intensity throughout the movie — should these kids stick together or go their separate ways? Are they helping each other as much as they’re hurting each other? It’s a lot of complication for a young-love movie, and Guadagnino makes the limits of their relationship much more tense than any question about who might hunt them down or who they might hunt.

Bones and All is going to be a hard sell for many audiences, given the strange way it straddles genres and tones. There’s almost a camp element to the ways Guadagnino contrasts the appealing image of Lee and Maren silently holding each other in a private moment, and the repulsive image of them slicked down with dark, clotting arterial blood and drawing flies as they flee the corpse of their latest victim. But the craft throughout the film is impressive and compelling. The casting and performances are shockingly great, particularly when an all-but-unrecognizable Michael Stuhlbarg and director David Gordon Green drop in for a stunning single-sequence cameo. And the entire enterprise is deliciously weird, the kind of movie that leaves people walking away thinking “I’ve never seen anything like that before.” This movie is drawing on some old, old tropes and familiar ideas. But it does it in a way that makes them feel as new, fresh, and exhilarating as young love itself.

Bones and All is now available for rental on Amazon , Vudu , and other digital platforms.

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Bones and All review: A cannibal romance with teeth

Love means never having to say you're sorry (that you eat people) for Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell in 'Call Me By Your Name' director Luca Guadagnino's latest.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

The girl can't help it. In the drab suburbs of mid-'80s America, a shy teenager named Maren ( Waves ' Taylor Russell), eager to fit in at a new school, is gamely doing her best to go along with slumber-party talk about boys and nail polish; instead, she grabs a new friend by the wrist and... chews one of those freshly-painted fingers right off. Maren has urges she can't control, which is why her dad ( André Holland ) deadbolts her door at night, and why they don't use their real names every time they have to move to another town. But even he throws up his hands — hey, at least he still has them — and walks out in one of Bones and All 's opening scenes.

Bones , which had its North American premiere last night at the Telluride Film Festival, is not the first movie about gorgeous cannibals this year, or even this festival season ( Fresh had a head start at Sundance). But it is directed by Luca Guadagnino, the Italian godhead behind arthouse swoons like I Am Love and Call Me by Your Name , and thus arrives with certain expectations: that it will be transgressive and romantic and probably inscrutably beautiful, or at least beautifully inscrutable. Once Maren connects with Lee ( Timothée Chalamet ), another "eater," in fact, Bones essentially becomes Cannibals: A Love Story . Beneath the visceral shock of its premise — and trust that there will be blood, along with torn skin and tendons and at least several organs á la carte — is less a straightforward horror exercise than a road-trip romance edged in darkness, in the vein of Badlands or Bonnie and Clyde or even Thelma & Louise . Take away the people-eating, and it could almost be a Springsteen song. Which often makes it feel, in a strange way, like Guadagnino's most traditional film to date — a born provocateur's faithful ode to a classic cinematic genre, only with human gristle between its teeth.

Fortunately, he also has a stable of actors who genuinely want to get weird, like Oscar winner Mark Rylance as Sully, a fellow eater Maren meets early on who speaks in a fluted rasp and dresses like some kind of carnie Indiana Jones. He's eager to teach her the life: tricks to sniff out a fellow traveler, how to minimize the risk and collateral damage of a kill — maybe too eager, with his keepsake bag of hair and tendency to refer to himself urgently and repeatedly in the third person (does anyone play malevolent kooks with more twinkly, slow-blinking glee than Rylance?). Chloe Sevigny and Guadagnino veteran Michael Stuhlbarg bring maximum strange to their standalone scenes, and of course there's Chalamet, Guadagnino's Call Me muse: His Lee is a wounded Tiger Beat pinup, a Kentucky boy in pan-gender thrift-store couture who lives with a desperate all-id intensity that often subsumes Russell's more tentative character. More than anyone, he leans into the ugly — even with those jutting, impossible cheekbones — and the vulnerability, too.

Maren's search for the mother she's never known, and the necessity of having to leave the scene of various crimes, drive the pair across the Midwest, in sequences that also recall recent films like Andrea Arnold's great reckless-youth elegy American Honey . Though they're mutually smitten, Maren remains far more conflicted than Lee about "the lifestyle," reluctant still to own what's always been inside of her. For both of them, feeding is an undeniable high, but they don't do it out of sadism or sociopathy; it's more like an unfortunate medical condition, or a recessive gene nobody asked for. One of the movie's most disturbing encounters, in fact, comes when the pair briefly meet a man ( David Gordon Green ) who isn't an eater so much as a super-fan; he doesn't have to, he just wants to.

Russell and Chalamet are both indisputably lovely to look at throughout, even in their insistent road-scuzz grubbiness. (Bathing on the lam is a privilege, not a right.) Guadagnino, working stateside for the first time, seems to revel in the dust and squalor of off-the-map '80s Americana, a place comprised of corn fields and carnivals and weed-choked parking lots. In all that there's some deeper metaphor, no doubt, about carrying the stain of otherness, and all the ways that love and shame can sublimate even a person's closest-held beliefs. Otherwise it's just two crazy kids with hope in their hearts and a femur bone, perhaps, in their throats, running as fast they can. Grade: B+

‘Bones and All’ Review: Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell Pair Up in Luca Guadagnino’s Meandering YA Cannibal Road Movie

It's a modified vampire film, a romance and a Chalamet fashion show. But mostly it's a dull ramble

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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Taylor Russell, an expressively melancholy actor who was one of the stars of “Waves,” plays Maren, who is 18, and who we meet while she’s still living with her dad (André Holland) in a trailer home, trying to fit in as a recently transplanted high-school student. She sneaks out to attend a sleepover, the main event of which is trying on different colors of nail polish. That seems to go well until Maren grabs the finger of one of her classmates and proceeds to chomp right through it, leaving the digit barely dangling from its hand.

When she gets home, her father springs into damage-control mode, trying to hustle them away before the police come. But he has had enough. Maren soon finds herself abandoned, with a cassette tape from dad explaining who, exactly, she is and why he can no longer stick around trying to protect her from herself.

Out on her own, Maren encounters another cannibal, a gothic eccentric named Sully, played by Mark Rylance (in the film’s grabbiest performance), who wears a hat with a feather and a long braided ponytail and speaks in a delicate Deep South drawl. Sully tells Maren that he can smell her; that’s how he knows she’s part of the cannibal tribe. And he wastes no time leading her to feast, in a scene of upstairs mayhem that looks like it would get four stars from Charles Manson. After decades of reviewing over-the-top horror, I realize I’m suddenly sounding very moralistic about the gore in “Bones and All,” but it’s only because I kept asking myself, What’s the point? The movie isn’t out to scare us. And since the characters themselves don’t experience their cannibalism as gross (the title describes the ultimate level of cannibalism: eating it all, including the bones), the fact that we in the audience do doesn’t exactly invite us to identify with them. The problem with these scenes is that we’re on the outside looking in.

Maren is laying low in a supermarket when she draws the gaze of Lee (Timothée Chalamet), who turns out to be a chivalrous soul, not to mention the most hiply dressed cannibal in the history of civilization. Before this week, Maren had never met another cannibal; now, just like that, she has met two of them (with more to come). If that sounds a bit unlikely, the upshot is that the script of “Bones and All,” by David Kajganich (who co-wrote Gaudignino’s “Suspiria” and “A Bigger Splash”), isn’t big on logic or consistency. It’s a catch-as-catch-can screenplay that has resulted in a haphazard ramble of a movie.

Maren and Lee fall in love (sort of), but mostly she’s searching for her backstory. She wants to find her mother, and does, learning that she was a cannibal, too. But even with the formidable Chloë Sevigny playing the mom as a mental patient who ate her own hands, the encounter doesn’t come to much. Some other good actors turn up: Michael Stulhbarg, cast against type as a grinning hick in overalls, and Jessica Harper, tersely compelling as Maren’s adoptive grandmother. And then they’re gone. There’s also a strange encounter between Lee and the circus worker he arranges to meet near a cornfield. The victim thinks it’s a hookup — and, in fact, there’s an extended shot in which we see Lee pleasuring his victim before eating him. But since that’s the only sex scene in the film, we wonder: Why is he doing this? Does Maren consider it a betrayal? (Note to screenwriter: We could have used an actual line of dialogue there.)

Maren and Lee drift from state to state, and the way Guadagnino flashes each location onscreen in oversize letters — Virginia! Kentucky! — it’s as if he were advancing the plot by telling us where we are. But sorry, there is no plot. Did the artful filmmaker of “Call Me by Your Name” really think there was? In “Bones and All,” there is only the morose samey-sameness of cool doomed attitude.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival, Sept. 2, 2022. MPA rating: R. Running time: 130 MIN.

Production: A Metro Goldwyn Mayer release of a Frenesy Film Company, Per Capita Productions production, in association with The Apartment Pictures, MeMo Films, 3MARYS Entertainment, Vision Distribution. Producers: Luca Guadagnino, David Kajganich, Franceso Melzi d’Eril, Marco Morabito, Gabriele Moratti, Peter Spears. Executive producers: Marco Colombo, Giovanni Corrado, Jonathan Montepare, Raffaella Viscardi, Moreno Zani.
Crew: Director: Luca Guadagnino. Screenplay: David Kajganich. Camera: Arseni Khachaturan. Editor: Marco Costa. Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross.
With: Timothée Chalamet, Taylor Russell, Mark Rylance, Jessica Harper, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny, David Gordon Green, André Holland.

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Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell in Bones and All.

Bones and All review – an elegant lovers-on-the-run road movie, with cannibals

Luca Guadagnino has surpassed himself with this poetic horror balancing threat, humour and emotional weight

S trip the flesh from the bones of the latest film by Luca Guadagnino and the skeletal story framework is a familiar one: it’s an outlaw lovers road movie, sharing DNA with dustbowl odysseys such as Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde . The backdrop for Bones and All is the 1980s, but it echoes the poor-eat-poor urgency of those other pictures, the poetic desperation of beautiful, rootless drifters taking what they need to survive. What sets this film apart, however, is the fact Maren (a magnetic Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) are “eaters”. Their survival depends on regular cannibalistic binges.

Guadagnino doesn’t shy away from the visceral shock of their unspeakable impulses: both Maren and Lee spend much of the time smeared in the congealing blood of their victims. And the act of feeding – tearing with teeth, face deep in the flesh of another human – is feral, animalistic and shameful. There’s a palpable threat, too, in the fellow “eaters” they encounter: Mark Rylance’s lip-smackingly grotesque performance as creepy loner Sully is particularly notable. But there’s also humour here – Maren’s realisation of her true nature comes at a disastrous slumber party – and crucially, there’s a real emotional weight.

In a way, the film is a distillation of themes from Guadagnino’s previous work. The intertwining of food and erotic appetites links back to I Am Love ; the achingly romantic yearnings of first love (and in Chalamet and Michael Stuhlbarg, two cast members) are shared with Call Me By Your Name ; the lurid genre impulses show the bloody fingerprints of Suspiria . But in the elegant balance of these seemingly incongruous elements, Guadagnino has outdone himself.

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Bones and All Review

A rich, somber horror-romance..

Bones and All is now in theaters.

Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All is lush, romantic, and brutal. A cannibal road trip movie that fleshes out its mythology akin to vampires or werewolves, it’s a poetic piece of American Gothic horror with unexpected turns rooted in rigorous character drama. Led by stellar performances from, among others, Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, and Mark Rylance, it feels fully lived-in even in its most languid moments, resulting in a work that’s both sweeter and funnier than you’d expect, but no less heart-wrenching.

It begins unassumingly in Virginia in the 1980s, where mixed-race teenage newcomer Maren (Russell) acclimates to her new school and to her wealthier white friends, despite attempts from her father, Frank (André Holland), to keep her sheltered. His reasons become all too clear when Maren sneaks out to a sleepover and, during a moment of physical and emotional intimacy with her classmate, gets carried away and takes a bite out of her finger. When she returns home covered in blood, Frank’s lack of surprise (and the quickness and routineness with which he has her pack up and leave) tells us this has happened before.

It's also the last straw. A few months after they move to Maryland under new identities, he reluctantly abandons Maren in the middle of the night, leaving her with nothing more than her birth certificate — which contains scant details about her estranged mother, who she barely remembers — and a Walkman with a cassette tape explaining his actions, and revealing parts of her bloodthirsty past he’d long kept hidden. Unable to listen to it all at once, she digests his audio confession in increments on the road while taking buses and hitching rides in the hopes of tracking her mother down and finding answers about herself.

This journey, its meetings, and its pitstops serve as a proxy for a tale of self-discovery, one punctuated by the same kind of loneliness and romance Guadagnino brought to Call Me By Your Name . It’s also rife with simmering feelings of queer self-hatred, with an obvious but effective parallel with the movie’s version of cannibalism — or “eaters” — for whom consumption and indulgence can be marked by shame. Guadagnino first taps into these feelings when Maren briefly crosses paths with an eccentric cannibal named Sully (Rylance), who sports a ponytail under a feathered hat, refers to himself in third person, and sniffs our young runaway protagonist from half a mile away. Eaters have a keen sense of smell, we learn from Sully, who not only teaches Maren some of the basics of “their” kind, but functions as a specter of a lonely future, a sort of queer-elder who’s seen the worst of what the world has to offer, and wants to prepare Maren for a life of survival in isolation.

What's the best Timothée Chalamet movie?

Despite the bloodshed occurring mostly off-screen, there’s a sense of ritualism to eating human flesh — not in a cultural or even occult sense, but as an act of intimacy between two people (whether two eaters, or an eater and the eaten). However, the cannibalism lore takes a backseat when Maren crosses paths with Lee (Chalamet), a young, brooding twentysomething straggler with an apparent moral code, and a semblance of remaining connection to his family (a rarity for eaters). He’s gaunt and awkward, with the kind of quiet disposition a teen like Maren might find mysterious, but there’s something obviously despondent about him too — between this and Call Me By Your Name, Guadagnino has perfected the art of using Chalamet to create Sadboi cinema — and the characters’ personal dynamic offers the movie a sense of novel calm, at least for a moment. Fittingly, a key scene for Lee and Maren’s understanding of other eaters (and of themselves) takes the form of a revelatory fireside chat with a character played by Michael Stuhlbarg. However, it’s the emotional antonym of its equivalent in Call Me By Your Name, creating tension and unease rather than comfort.

As Maren and Lee make their way across the U.S., Guadagnino and cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan paint each location with a tangible texture, using celluloid to capture both atmospheric warmth and emotional mystery in the air. They even play tricks with exposure for handfuls of frames, during moments where vivid memories briefly invade the characters’ consciousness, as if to root their troubling thoughts in physical sensations, burned onto the film. All the while, composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross play with mischievous, haunting tones , with each stretched, individual guitar note practically anticipating the next one, as if it were reaching out through the lonely silences between them — until that silence becomes filled with an ethereal melody. It’s the sound of falling in love, but it’s ever so mournful too, as if Maren and Lee’s romance isn’t long for this world for one reason or another.

Some of the movie’s zigs and zags may not feel entirely in tune with its listlessness — one late turn in particular, while shockingly visceral, works to make its silent, lingering horrors a bit too overt — but there are rarely moments when Bones and All doesn’t feel engrossing. Guadagnino wields sorrow not as an affect, but as a fabric, one that ripples with the weight of the past even before it’s fully rediscovered, resulting in a film where love feels as much like a burden as it does liberation.

A lush, richly conceived cannibal road-trip romance, Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All lives in the intimate space between love and self-hatred, with characters who connect over their shared hunger for human flesh. Everything from its performances to its music feels fine-tuned to tell a story about reaching out through the void, no matter what reaches or bites back.

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Move review: 'bones and all'.

Bob Mondello

Film director Luca Guadagnino reunites with "Call Me By Your Name" star Timothée Chalamet for "Bones and All," a dark, romance/drama based on author Camille DeAngelis' young adult novel.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

The first time filmmaker Luca Guadagnino and actor Timothee Chalamet worked together, it was on the romantic drama "Call Me By Your Name," based on a novel set in the 1980s. Their new film "Bones And All," is also based on a novel set in the '80s. It also depicts a romance, but critic Bob Mondello says there is a difference. This one has a lot of blood.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: As played by Taylor Russell and Timothee Chalamet, Maren and Lee are a gorgeous couple. Sitting in an open field somewhere in the Midwest, they are - though they're on the run - the very picture of romance, holding hands, sharing secrets - one secret in particular. They're young. They're in love. They eat people.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BONES AND ALL")

TIMOTHEE CHALAMET: (As Lee) You don't think I'm a bad person?

TAYLOR RUSSELL: (As Maren Yearly) All I think is that I love you.

MONDELLO: Camille DeAngelis set her novel near the end of the Reagan era, when cannibalism could serve as an apt metaphor for American excess. Director Luca Guadagnino doesn't lean on politics as much as on poetry, on youth. These kids are outsiders, still finding themselves. It would be wrong to call them innocent, but what they're hungriest for is connection.

RUSSELL: (As Maren Yearly) I don't want to hurt anybody.

CHALAMET: (As Lee) Famous last words.

MONDELLO: In the film's opening scenes, the director shows how the world sees them - Maren, a shy teen in a new school whose dad is so insistent that she stay home nights, he actually locks her door when they finish dinner.

MADELEINE HALL: (As Kim) Hey.

MONDELLO: But an invite to a new classmate's slumber party? She slips out a window and arrives just as quiet time is descending and fingernail polishes are being displayed.

HALL: (As Kim) So you can't spend the night?

RUSSELL: (As Maren Yearly) Not all night. I should be back by 6 to be safe. I'll just head out when you guys want to sleep.

MONDELLO: The host's ring finger is being painted a new shade.

KENDLE COFFEY: (As Sherry) Try that. It's called copper fever.

MONDELLO: She looks and frowns.

HALL: (As Kim) It's too orange.

MONDELLO: But Maren seems to find it appealing. She leans forward, takes the girl's finger gently in her mouth and bites it off.

HALL: (As Kim, screaming).

MONDELLO: Now it's clear why Dad locked her door - why this was a new school.

ANDRE HOLLAND: (As Frank Yearly) You didn't. In the car in 3 minutes. Whatever you can take in 3 minutes.

MONDELLO: Dad disappears once they're are a couple of states away, leaving cash and a cassette saying why he can't stay, at which point Maren's a bit lost. But he also left her birth certificate, so she sets off to find the mother she never knew. It's on that trip that she discovers there are others like her.

MARK RYLANCE: (As Sully) I came looking for you. I smelled you.

MONDELLO: Sully's recognized a kindred spirit.

RYLANCE: (As Sully) I thought you might be hungry.

MONDELLO: He wants to take her under his wing, show her how to harvest folks who are about to die...

RUSSELL: (As Maren Yearly) Who lives here? Is there someone dead up there?

MONDELLO: ...So she needn't kill - show her how to survive.

RYLANCE: (As Sully) I got rules - never, never, ever eat an eater.

MONDELLO: But she doesn't trust him. And when she encounters Lee a bit later in a supermarket altercation with a bully...

SEAN BRIDGERS: (As Barry Cook) You dumb ho.

RUSSELL: (As Maren) Hey, don't talk to her like that.

CHALAMET: (As Lee) You're out of control, buddy.

BRIDGERS: (As Barry Cook) You with the store or something?

CHALAMET: (As Lee) No, I'm not the store, but I'm going to escort you out of it.

MONDELLO: They find themselves on the same team, as it were.

BRIDGERS: (As Barry Cook) Oh, we're going outside.

CHALAMET: (As Lee) Do you enjoy hassling people, man?

MONDELLO: He won't for long. And Lee and Maren will then bond, as young people do, over shared experiences, first times...

RUSSELL: (As Maren Yearly) What was it like?

CHALAMET: (As Lee) A rush. I could feel every blood vessel, like, spider-webbing through me, kind of like some kind of weird new superhero.

RUSSELL: (As Maren Yearly) What about afterward? What'd you feel about it? What'd you think?

CHALAMET: (As Lee) I don't remember after.

MONDELLO: For all the blood and cannibalism that it's hard to call tasteful exactly, "Bones And All" turns out to be dreamily resonant as a portrait of teenagers - isolated, marginalized, filled with urges of which they're sometimes ashamed, finding first love in a world where their appetites make sense to no one but themselves. I'm Bob Mondello.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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Bones and All Is Curiously Bloodless

In the cannibal road-movie romance Bones and All , the characters’ central affliction is treated not merely as a carnivorous biological need (a hereditary one, no less) but also as a kind of shared language, a spiritual and social bond. Cannibals can smell each other, we’re told, and the more experienced ones can sniff out their fellow human flesh-eaters from miles away. As such, one is tempted to read cannibalism in this film as a metaphor of some sort, though it really could represent just about anything. And the whole monstrous-conditions-as-metaphors-for-forbidden-desire thing became rather passé years ago. Director Luca Guadagnino wisely makes sure not to play things too coyly or abstractly. He really gets into the cannibalism itself, into the blood and the gore and the bits of flesh hanging off people’s mouths. He might have had his high-minded reasons for making the movie, but he clearly enjoys just plain grossing us out, too.

So at least there’s that. The pleasures of Bones and All wind up being incidental and, sadly, fleeting — an effectively grisly scene here, an arresting performance there. The film, as a whole, never quite hangs together, because even as it goes through the motions of both the road movie and the romance, it never really finds an animating energy to drive it along. It wants to move us, but it feels cold and empty — curiously bloodless, despite all the, you know, blood.

Part of the problem might be the lack of chemistry between its two stars. That’s not to say that they’re not talented. As the protagonist, Maren Yearly, who finds herself on her own after her dad leaves on her 18th birthday, Taylor Russell brings just the right feral inquisitiveness, with eyes that see right through you and a hungry lean that hints at the predator beneath; her posture, we imagine, might be the same whether she’s tearing into a body or looking for self-knowledge.

However, as Lee, a Kentucky drifter with whom Maren soon falls in love, Timothée Chalamet seems unable to muster anything resembling passion. To be fair, part of that is probably by design: Another cannibal (played by a very game Michael Stuhlbarg) suggests that Lee is holding his urges back, that he’s trying to maintain a sense of control over his chaotic reality. The still-innocent Maren has all sorts of questions about their condition, and the standoffish Lee doesn’t seem eager to answer them. But Chalamet’s performance doesn’t convey any of this inner conflict; there’s no tension behind the eyes. All we’re left with is a nice man with big hair and extravagantly torn jeans struggling with a country-boy accent.

Could it be the filmmaking? The actor certainly has proven his range and skill in previous films, including Guadagnino’s own masterpiece, Call Me by Your Name . But this time out, he’s directed more like a movie star than an actor — a presence instead of a person. It feels like exactly the wrong choice for this particular performer. It prevents the movie from having any kind of pulse.

Guadagnino has also surrounded his young lovers with a host of bizarre, over-the-top performances that heighten the alien nature of this world. Chief among them is Mark Rylance, playing an eccentric, nomadic cannibal named Sully who gives Maren an early lesson in how to feed herself, but whose motives remain delectably mysterious. Rylance can turn a meek murmur into a menacing glare at a moment’s notice. You want to giggle at his performance, but it’s a nervous giggle — yes, the character is ridiculous, but also, we really, truly don’t know what he will do next. Chloë Sevigny briefly shows up late in the film for one quiet, scarring scene. These performances are presumably there to provide a contrast with the stability and peace our protagonists seek, but they also inadvertently keep reminding us of the far more compelling movie Bones and All could have been.

The director tries to fill in the empty spaces where emotional engagement should be with some nice photography and a deluge of music, much of it consisting of an insistently twangy, sub-Sundance faux -folk score that, shockingly, is credited to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The approach might have worked, once. Wim Wenders used to make movies like this in his sleep. But those classic road movies worked because that director (and others who delved into the genre, such as Terrence Malick and Gus Van Sant) clearly shared a fascination with — and even love for — the land and the people along the way. It’s hard to sense any similar affection or interest in this world on Guadagnino’s part. The whole film, for all its gore and talk of animalistic abandon, feels like a dutiful, skin-deep pastiche.

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Bones and All Movie Review: Luca Guadagnino Meets Horror in a Whole New Way

Bones and all stars timothée chalamet and taylor russell and is directed by luca guadagnino.

Review: Although it may seem like an idea and concept that would never work, Luca Guadagnino pulls off another incredibly unique movie with Bones and All as Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet feed on the flesh of others and try to survive on the fringes of society.

Bones and All Review Luca Guadagnino Movie Horror Film Timothee Chalamet

It took me too long to see Bones and All and I regret it. Some movies you just don’t get to see in theaters if you live in a small- ish town, and Bones and All fell victim to that. Or maybe I’m the victim. Regardless, I had to wait for it to hit VOD before I could finally check out Luca Guadagnino’s latest project. And while I felt confident that he’d be able to deliver another successful and warming movie, I didn’t have cannibal love story on my Guadagnino bingo card.

The story is adapted from the 2015 novel of the same name, written by Camille DeAngelis. It centers on two young, impressionable cannibals Maren and Lee as they travel a country they feel left out of due to their unrelenting cravings. The story serves as a really interesting genre mashup as Guadagnino combines flavors of horror, romance, and drama to create something he’s never done and that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen been attempted.

Naturally, my favorite aspect of Bones and All is that every second of this Luca Guadagnino cannibal movie feels like a Luca Guadagnino cannibal movie. He doesn’t sacrifice many of his stylistic impulses that make him so unique as an auteur. It feels rich and deeply mused over from the opening title card to the closing credits, and Guadagnino finds enough love in between the horror to make this story feel authentic.

Like many of his previous films, Guadagnino casts Bones and All to perfection. Timothée Chalamet appears again after their collaboration with Call Me By Your Name , and Taylor Russell gives the best performance of her young, promising career. Both are incredibly young and vulnerable throughout the movie, and it rings quite effective in their interactions between each other and the world surrounding them.

Because after all, Bones and All is heavily about finding your way through society as an outsider. Luca Guadagnino loves to set his films in the fringes of society, so it isn’t very difficult to see why this source material was so interesting to him. There are chances for him to explore genre (the horror and action is absolutely riveting. I love seeing him return to experimental style clashes like he did with Suspiria in 2018), while still relying on the emotional weight that perfectly backs it up.

I have less context for Taylor Russell as an introspective and dynamic actress besides Waves , but not she’s on my radar and I’m excited to see where she goes from here. I’d take ten films by Luca Guadagnino that star these two – their connection feels completely honest and genuine and unique compared to contemporary movies in this style.

And then there’s obviously Timothée Chalamet , who I won’t quite venture to say gives the best performance of his career, but it’s close. He frequently appears in indie hits, but he rarely stars in them. They’re mostly side characters like Saoirse Ronan’s love interest in Lady Bird , or Jennifer Lawrence’s in Don’t Look Up . And while I like him in Dune and I’m excited to see him take on that character in the future, he’s given way more to do in Bones and All .

Chalamet is a generational talent, and it seems Luca Guadagnino has found the best way to use him considering his best two performances are this and Call Me By Your Name . I’m not sure which I’d take seeing as I’ve only screened Bones and All once, but there’s a chance in the future it could overtake the former. While he plays the relatively same spacy, punk kid in many of his roles, Bones and All allows him to get as gnarly and primal as he’s ever been. It feels real experimental while still being completely in his wheelhouse.

Reviews for Films like Bones and All (2022)

Fresh Movie Review Horror Film Poster Daisy Edgar-Jones Sabastian Stan Sundance Festival

I have a few comments on the screenplay, but this is where my lack of the source material may be my own personal fault. Mark Rylance serves as the antagonist for Bones and All and I found both his performance and character to be at war with what I loved with this film. He’s the disruptor between Taylor Russell’s Maren and Timothée Chalamet’s Lee, and while I understand the importance of having him in the movie, he opts for a cooky, inhumane performance that feels tonally at odds with everything else Guadagnino sets up.

This may just be a long-winded way of saying that I found Bones and All to be an exceptional romance and an alright drama. Maren’s long search for her family weaves in and out of the narrative and mostly feels like a vehicle to get these two travelling across the country. It doesn’t offer much beyond a somewhat awkward confrontation between her and her mother.

Lee’s familial background gets a bit more substance, although I was mostly enamored with the fact that Anna Cobb plays his sister after starring in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair – a delightful surprise, I hope we see more from her. We learn about his relationship with his abusive father and what drove him away, but it rarely feels like it’s able to cut deep enough to get under your skin. While it’s still good and occasionally affecting, it’s not quite great.

But besides those few gripes, I found Bones and All to be incredibly powerful and sentimental. The performances are ones for the ages and Luca Guadagnino continues doing what he does best – putting vulnerable people in vulnerable situations. A sign of a really good film is that I want to go back and fill in the gaps from what I’ve missed in his past work, and needless to say, Guadagnino’s previous stuff is now on my watchlist. He’s a good filmmaker!

Genre: Drama , Horror , Romance

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Bones and All Movie Cast and Credits

Bones and All Poster and Review Luca Guadagnino Movie Horror Film Timothee Chalamet

Taylor Russell as Maren Yearly

Timothée Chalamet as Lee

Mark Rylance as Sully

Anna Cobb as Kayla

André Holland as Leonard Yearly

Michael Stuhlbarg as Jake

David Gordon Green as Brad

Jessica Harper as Barbara Kerns

Chloë Sevigny as Janelle Kerns

Jake Horowitz as Lance

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Writers: David Kajganich , Camille DeAngelis (Original Writer)

Cinematography: Arseni Khachaturan

Editor: Marco Costa

Composers: Trent Reznor , Atticus Ross

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‘Bones and All’ Review: Timothée Chalamet Makes Sparks Fly and People Die in Cannibal Road Movie

Luca Guadagnino’s film feels like a mad science experiment to see if “Raw” can coexist with “Badlands” in the body of a gooey Young Adult love tale

This review originally ran September 2, 2022, in conjunction with the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

You’ve got to hand it to Luca Guadagnino — the man cannot coast. So ever since the Italian filmmaker found himself on the American prestige track, he’s done just about anything to get the hell off. Remake “Suspiria” as a somber meditation on historical memory and survivor’s guilt? OK, sure – but only with Tilda Swinton in old man drag, so people won’t take things too seriously.

Reunite “Call Me By Your Name” players Timothée Chalamet and Michael Stuhlbarg for a new coming-of-age film? Great! Make it a cannibal road movie with over-the-top gore — that’ll show the hoi polloi.

But it turns out that the joke’s on Guadagnino — because at the Venice Film Festival on Friday, the audience ate “Bones and All” up.

One could easily see why. Genuinely frightening in stretches and with the creep-o-meter jacked up to 1,000 all the way through, “Bones and All” is somehow more and less than a simple horror flick, and not quite a rambling romance. Though adapted by David Kajganich from Camille DeAngelis’ novel, Guadagnino’s film instead feels more like a bet, a mad science experiment to see if “Raw” can coexist with “Badlands” in the body of a gooey Young Adult love tale. The end result is unstable –- too unstable to hold — but the attempt, quite literally, takes guts.

It’s morning in Reagan’s America, and Maren (Taylor Russell) is off to school. She seems like a normal teenager, withdrawn but well liked all the same. So why does she live with her dear papa (Andre Holland, terrific in a small, mostly-there-for-exposition kind of role) in a sparse trailer that can be fled in three minutes flat? And why does he lock her in at night? The answer comes in a worst-case scenario sleepover that punctuates the prologue with a bloody burst, while striking a precise footing between teen melodrama and Grand Guignol shocks that the rest of the film often struggles to find anew.

In any case, soon enough the young girl is out on her own, hitting the open road with nothing but her wits and taste for human flesh to guide her. That is, until she meets Sully (Mark Rylance, looking more like Harry Dean Stanton than Harry Dean ever could, and chewing on a thick southern drawl in between bites of other, more illicit delicacies). Reading from the Y.A. playbook culled from “Star Wars” to Harry Potter to “X-Men,” our guide Sully corrects an incorrect assumption. Maren, you see, is not a misfit outcast all alone in the world. Well, technically she is, but she’s also a star in a much greater constellation, a member of a gifted and secret community hidden in plain sight throughout the Great Plains. She is an Eater. And of course, so is he.

Rules and initiation rites follow, but the main takeaway is this: Eaters don’t eat fellow Eaters. So by the time the tweaked out Lee (Timothée Chalamet, chalamaying) enters the scene, you can rest assured the only tension between the young pair will be of the romantic sort. Sparks fly, people die and cannibal mouths are fed. They make a good team, and so they set out, two drifters off to see the world.

For all the lore behind it, the road-movie moves at a meandering pace, dawdling in this or that Midwest hamlet, stopping for short visits with Chloe Sevigny, Jessica Harper and (oddly enough) director David Gordon Green.

When Stuhlbarg shows up – dressed like a castoff from “The Hills Have Eyes,” as if to make clear the vast gulf between his and Chalamet’s previous onscreen appearance – the character actor makes the film’s title clear. To go bones and all, he explains, is to go all in – to ascend toward a higher level of cannibalism by leaving no trace behind. The concept is symbolic – this is a film about a young and all-consuming love affair – only it also quite neatly describes Guadagnino’s style.

“Bones and All” sees the filmmaker go big – hell, it sees everyone go big, from Rylance’s turbo-charged weirdo to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ wall-to-wall score. The scares are real and lasting, the romantic interludes swoon, and the shots of rugged American grandeur are never too far off. Even apart from the tonal swings from prairie reverie to epic romance to body horror, the project treats its central conceit with similar “Why Not Both?” gluttony.

The cannibalism here is both metaphoric and all too literal. At separate (and sometimes simultaneous) intervals, our young Eaters are symbolic stand-ins for drug addiction, preying on the already socially marginalized, and thus at risk; they evoke queer culture and the quiet communities that made life in Reagan’s America livable; they are avatars of generational trauma, of the (once again, literal and symbolic) scars parents leave on their children.

But wait! They are also Anne Rice’s vampires, made modern with carnal connotations. (Gazing at his co-star with a solemn, saucy look, Chalamet asks: “When was your first?”) They do all that and more, filling whatever hook the scene calls for and then moving on down the road. And at the end of the day, aren’t they a pair of kids hungry for life?

They are, of course. And so is the overall film. When taken altogether it makes for one particularly rich meal – well prepared, but rather difficult to digest.

“Bones and All” opens Nov. 23 in U.S. theaters via MGM/UA.

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Bones and all, common sense media reviewers.

Chalamet stars in edgy, intense, ultra-gory book adaptation.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

As downbeat and violent as this film is, there are

Lee and Maren are relatable and tragic characters.

One of the two main characters is a young woman of

Extremely bloody violence: on-screen murder by blu

Romance is central, with a young couple frequently

Uses of "f--k," "f--king," "s--t," and "a--hole,"

Multiple characters smoke cigarettes. In one scene

Positive Messages

As downbeat and violent as this film is, there are still messages to be found about how marginalized people find comfort together, and the pain experienced by those who hurt others.

Positive Role Models

Lee and Maren are relatable and tragic characters. They're caught in the grip of an irresistible impulse and only want to live their lives in peace. Even villains in this complicated movie have complex and understandable motivations.

Diverse Representations

One of the two main characters is a young woman of color; her race is never mentioned (she's played by Taylor Russell, who has a Black father and a White mother), but her youth and gender are referred to by others who think that makes her an easy target (it doesn't). The other main character and most side characters are White.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Extremely bloody violence: on-screen murder by bludgeoning and stabbing; scenes of people biting and eating bloody parts of a dead body (stringy goop comes out, along with pooling, dripping, and spouting blood and lumps of tissue). Cannibals enthusiastically eat dead bodies, resulting in bloody faces, tissue stuck between teeth, and horribly maimed bodies, both living and dead. A character masturbates another to the moment of orgasm and then slits his throat and kills him. A man menaces a much younger and smaller woman, holds her at knifepoint, then lies on her body and kisses her.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Romance is central, with a young couple frequently kissing and clinging to each other. Some of their passionate kisses come after they eat human flesh and have bloody hands and faces. In one scene, two characters kiss, and then we see one masturbating the other from behind with moans and suggestive hand movements before a throat is slit and blood spurts out (a clear symbolic stand-in for semen). Nudity includes a scene in which an elderly woman's dead body is naked on the floor while cannibals start eating her (viewers see her breasts at length), and one in which two people embrace while shirtless (a bare breast is seen from the side).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Uses of "f--k," "f--king," "s--t," and "a--hole," as well as a slur for gay men ("f--got") and a vulgar word for female genitalia that's also an insult ("c--t").

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Multiple characters smoke cigarettes. In one scene, characters share a case of beer until they're all buzzed/drunk.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Bones and All is an edgy romantic drama based on Camille DeAngelis' same-named 2015 novel about two young cannibals ( Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet ) on a road trip across America. The mood veers sharply from tender romance to extremely intense violence and horror and back again. There's also relatable interpersonal drama, which could give the violent scenes even more impact. Characters whom viewers get to know and sympathize with are suddenly and horribly murdered on-screen -- they're bludgeoned, stabbed, and bitten. Expect many close-ups of biting mouths and teeth and bloody, mangled flesh. In one scene, cannibals wait for an elderly woman to die (she's shown moaning and shaking in pain) before they start taking bites from her nude body (bare breasts shown). In another scene, one man masturbates another before slitting his throat at the moment of orgasm (suggestive hand movements, moaning). A man menaces a much younger and smaller woman, holds her at knifepoint, and then lies on her body and kisses her. Characters kiss and make references to sex, and multiple characters smoke cigarettes and drink beer. Language includes "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," "f--got," "c--t," and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (4)
Kids say (18)

Based on 4 parent reviews

What's the Story?

Directed by Luca Guadagnino ( Call Me by Your Name ) and based on the same-named book by Camille DeAngelis, BONES AND ALL introduces viewers to Maren ( Taylor Russell ), whose life is in tumult due to her irresistible impulse to eat human flesh. As she travels through the United States searching for her estranged mother ( Chloë Sevigny ), Maren meets up with Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a man who shares her taboo compulsion. Driven to kill and to cannibalize, can these two find a way to live with their urges and move forward into a less horrific future?

Is It Any Good?

By turns romantic, delicate, terrifying, and positively nauseating, this book-based horror romance is an unsettling yet strangely beautiful cinematic experience that lingers. Many viewers are likely to have seen "young murderers on the run" dramas ( Badlands, Bonnie and Clyde ) and romantic films with the undead in love ( Twilight , Warm Bodies ), but both of those subgenres generally tone down the violence in favor of longing gazes and tender kisses. But in Bones and All , the youthful main characters meet-cute directly after one of them has waited all night for a woman to die on the floor of her bedroom before bloodily chomping her nude torso.

It's hard to know how to take the contrasts, which seesaw back and forth throughout the film. Maren is on a search for her estranged mother (relatable), and every few days she enriches her diner-food diet with raw, recently dead human flesh (not so relatable). Lee, a lonely soul who's been cast out of his family and home without a friend (pitiable), murders passing strangers in the town he wanders through (yikes). The chemistry between Russell and Chalamet is palpable, and both are given strong, sympathetic roles that are literally meaty in every way. In some moments, you may find yourself wanting nothing more than for these two to cast off their bloody practices and continue drifting romantically from one beautiful empty American vista to another. At other moments, viewers will understandably recoil in horror and disgust. Those with weaker stomachs may even tap out. But those who can take it may find this curious artifact of a film uniquely beguiling, a carnal romance in every sense of that word.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in Bones and All , which is quite intense, especially for a movie that also has themes of romance and self-actualization. Did the amount of violence surprise you? Did it turn you off the film completely?

The movie's tone varies more than most, which tend to stick to a single genre: horror, romance, comedy, etc. Which tones are found in Bones and All ? Do the comic and romantic moments make the horrifying ones more horrifying?

How do you think viewers are supposed to feel about Maren and Lee? Are we supposed to relate to them? Like them? Despise them? Pity them? A mixture of all of these emotions? How does the filmmaker evoke these feelings and signal characters' motivations and inner life?

If you've read the book the movie was based on, how do the two compare? Which do you prefer, and why?

Movie Details

In theaters : November 18, 2022
On DVD or streaming : December 13, 2022
Cast : Timothée Chalamet , Taylor Russell , Mark Rylance
Director : Luca Guadagnino
Inclusion Information : Gay directors, Middle Eastern/North African directors, Female actors, Black actors
Studios : United Artists Releasing , Warner Bros.
Genre : Romance
Topics : Book Characters
Run time : 130 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : strong, bloody and disturbing violent content, language throughout, some sexual content and brief graphic nudity
Last updated : October 30, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Cast & crew
User reviews

Bones and All

A young woman embarks on a 1000 mile odyssey through America where she meets a disenfranchised drifter. But all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and to a final stand that will deter... Read all A young woman embarks on a 1000 mile odyssey through America where she meets a disenfranchised drifter. But all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and to a final stand that will determine whether love can survive their otherness. A young woman embarks on a 1000 mile odyssey through America where she meets a disenfranchised drifter. But all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and to a final stand that will determine whether love can survive their otherness.

Luca Guadagnino
David Kajganich
Camille DeAngelis
Timothée Chalamet
Taylor Russell
Mark Rylance
307 User reviews
259 Critic reviews
74 Metascore
4 wins & 75 nominations

Maren's Father

Attendant (Corlis, MD)

Boy Playing Ball Toss

Clerk (MN Gas Station)

Barbara Kerns
Gail the Nurse

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

Trivia During production, the film's crew were burglarized. The Cincinnati City Council with the mayor's support ultimately provided $50,000 in security costs.
Goofs While Maren shoplifting in Indiana 1988, customers complains "What kind of grocery store runs out of Lunchables". Lunchables as a brand was introduced in Seattle 1988 and nationally 1989.

Maren : [to Brad] You're not one of us?

Jake : Abso-fuckin-lutely normal he is! Well, uh, clearly not normal. Hasn't had his full bones yet. But I reckon that's coming soon enough.

Lee : Full bones?

Jake : When you eat the whole thing, bones and all. You ain't done that yet? That's a big fucking deal. It's like your first time. There's before bones and all, and then there's after.

Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: BONES AND ALL is the Most Disgusting Movie of the Year - Movie and Book Explained (2022)
Soundtracks Lick It Up Written by Vinnie Vincent (as Vincent Cusano), Paul Stanley Performed by KISS

User reviews 307

knoxville_chocolate
Nov 27, 2022
How long is Bones and All? Powered by Alexa
November 23, 2022 (United States)
United States
united artists releasing
Hasta los huesos
University of Cincinnati, Zimmer Hall - 315 College Drive, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA (location)
Frenesy Film Company
Per Capita Productions
The Apartment
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$16,000,000 (estimated)
$15,234,907

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 11 minutes
Dolby Digital

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Bones And All Review

23 Nov 2022

Bones And All

Bones And All seems, at first glance, to be another entry in the ‘Sexy Vampires’ canon. Strictly speaking, the blood-sucking heroes of Luca Guadagnino ’s seventh film are a kind of cannibal-vampire hybrid, chowing down on flesh just as much as blood, with the ability to smell one another. But flesh-eating is really only half the story; as with the book by Camille DeAngelis on which it is based, this is a simmering, softly played story, told with both tenderness and violence.

An understated character study of burgeoning sexuality in the 1980s, it feels very much of a piece with Call Me By Your Name , Guadagnino’s masterful, Italy-set 2017 romantic drama. So when the first act of cannibalism arrives in the opening few minutes, with a finger suddenly bitten clean off, it hits like a hammer: this is not just another bite of the peach.

It’s played beautifully and believably by Taylor Russell as Maren, the finger-biter in question, carrying the film with an unguarded, raw energy. She’s playing much younger than her actual age, but shows the same captivating naivety and sense of sexual awakening that made Timothée Chalamet a star in Call Me By Your Name . Reuniting with Guadagnino here, Chalamet is almost an elder statesman, a slightly more experienced cannibal showing Maren the ropes, and together they forge a nomadic life on the road together, sharing a fiery, unpolished chemistry.

There are all sorts of outsider allegories you can read into the cannibalism. At the start of the film, Maren lives in a rundown, one-bedroom mobile home, and seems quietly jealous of her wealthy, white suburban friends, a racial and class anxiety that seems to bleed into her bloodlust; it’s impossible, too, not to find a queer reading here, even in heterosexual characters. Lines like, “I thought I was the only one,” could have been plucked straight out of a gay coming-of-age drama.

A contained character study about the most human of passions and desires, wrapped up in inhuman tastes.

But it’s a story that can just as easily be taken at face value. Unlike his last toe-dip into genre, the ambitious but misguided Suspiria , Guadagnino doesn’t force the audience’s hand with a message. This is a contained character study about the most human of passions and desires, wrapped up in inhuman tastes.

Guadagnino is interested, too, in different responses to abnormal urges. Everyone has their own form of ethics. Michael Stuhlbarg (in a horrifying Call Me By Your Name reunion with Chalamet) plays a hillbilly who espouses eating human bones, while Mark Rylance offers a typically precise performance as a lonely cannibal drifter who only eats the nearly dead — as shudderingly creepy as he is morbidly funny. (“I ate my own grandad,” he offers, matter-of-factly.)

For most of the film, the director finds extraordinary beauty in the grit of the Midwest, criss-crossing America to an evocative period soundtrack, so it’s almost a shame that the final act has to end in more formulaic genre fashion. But blips are rare here. This is a devastatingly romantic road movie, one that will make your heart ache as easily as your stomach churn.

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Bones and All review: A cannibal lovers movie with no heart

“Bones and All is another achingly romantic, occasionally horrifying film from director Luca Guadagnino that doesn't quite manage to hit the same highs as some of his previous efforts.”

Taylor Russell's soulful lead performance
Michael Stuhlbarg and Mark Rylance's scene-stealing supporting turns
Arseni Khachaturan's stunning cinematography
An overly leisurely pace
A climax that misses the mark
Clunky dialogue throughout

Bones and All is a curiously twangy, blood-stained addition to the canon of American road movies. The film, which was shot on location in Ohio, reunites director Luca Guadagnino with his Call Me By Your Name star, Timothée Chalamet, on an adventure that takes the latter’s young, conflicted character across multiple midwestern states. Joining them on the trip is Taylor Russell, a long-promising young star who is, at long last, given the spotlight she deserves in Bones and All , which casts her and Chalamet as a pair of nomadic cannibals struggling to find a place in a world populated by humans who, understandably, have little interest in being eaten.

In many ways, Bones and All feels like an inevitable mixture of the romance and horror genres that Guadagnino has played around with in the past. Its achingly romantic story feels akin to the forbidden romance the Italian director explored in Call Me By Your Name , while its instances of blood-soaked violence inevitably call to mind the moments of body horror present in Guadagnino’s 2018 reimagining of Suspiria . However, despite all its technically impressive parts, there’s something missing in Bones and All , a film that feels surprisingly tame given the contents of its story.

Based on a 2015 novel by Camille DeAngelis, Bones and All follows Maren Yearly (Russell), a young girl whose cannibal urges eventually force her to set out on her own when she turns 18. While on a journey to find her absent mother, Maren crosses paths with Lee (Chalamet), a fellow cannibal who has grown used to the nomadic lifestyle for similar, if slightly more brutal, reasons as Maren. The two quickly grow close, committing to a romance that’s based as much on understanding as it is on Maren and Lee’s shared hunger.

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Despite Maren’s desire to find her mother, Bones and All moves at a leisurely pace that makes its connection and debt to the great American road movies of the past undeniably clear. Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s uncharacteristically acoustic, plucking score only further drives home Bones and All ’s connection to films like Paris, Texas , which relies just as heavily on Ry Cooder’s folk music to set its warm, aching mood as it does on Robby Müller’s customarily resplendent cinematography. To the film’s credit, Bones and All may even be the most visually stunning exploration of rural America since Müller and director Wim Wenders made their fateful trip to the states back in 1984.

Guadagnino and cinematographer Arseni Khachaturan not only fill Bones and All with gorgeous, sun-drenched frames but also highlight the mundanity of rural American architecture and life. All the film’s houses seem to creak and shudder beneath the weight of their shoddy construction, and Guadagnino effectively juxtaposes the haunted atmosphere of Bones and All ’s old houses, factories, and mental hospitals with the freedom offered by America’s midwestern plains.

In a film that’s so often about the search for freedom and comfort, it’s no mistake that Bones and All frequently returns to images of its two protagonists sitting totally relaxed together amid the wide expansiveness of Ohio’s seemingly endless fields.

What Bones and All has in its gorgeous textures and compositions, it ultimately lacks in intensity. The film’s script is meandering and listless, which might not be an issue were it not for the tragically brutal direction that Bones and All ultimately takes. Tonally and structurally, Guadagnino tries to split the difference between an American road movie, YA romance, and body horror film, but the film often presents itself and its story in such a nonchalant, unassuming fashion that it ends up coming across as emotionally flat.

Part of that is due to the fact that Chalamet feels woefully miscast as Lee. The actor’s previous collaboration with Guadagnino established him as a performer capable of portraying loneliness and yearning in a tender way, but both he and his director are unable to bring the same warmth and compelling internal conflict to Lee. That fact, combined with Chalamet’s inability to consistently sell Bones and All ’s occasionally clunky dialogue, leaves his performance feeling strangely flat and one-note.

Russell, for her part, fares far better. As Maren, the actress brings a youthful curiosity and heartfelt warmth that both the film and its central love story desperately needs.

Guadagnino, whether wisely or not, surrounds Russell and Chalamet with performers who go far bigger and far nastier than they do. Chief among the film’s supporting players is Mark Rylance, whose turn as a socially awkward cannibal named Sully alternates between a kind of pathetic neediness and terrifying obsessiveness. Michael Stuhlbarg, meanwhile, nearly steals the entire film in a scene that gives him the chance to show up wearing nothing but denim overalls and deliver a monologue about the pleasures of devouring another human being while lit by the haunting amber light of a nearby bonfire.

It’s in Stuhlbarg’s one scene that Bones and All is at its most dangerous and perverse, and that’s why it lingers so much longer than the rest of the film, which despite all of its moments of flesh-tearing cannibalism, lacks any real bite.

Bones and All is playing in theaters now.

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Product Reviews

The countdown is on for Dr. Indiana Jones to crack his bullwhip and remind the world about his fear of snakes in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Harrison Ford reprises his iconic role one last time for the upcoming fifth Indiana Jones movie. Dial of Destiny will be the first film in franchise history not to be directed by Steven Spielberg or written by George Lucas. Both men will serve as executive producers.

Dial of Destiny opens in theaters on June 30, leaving fans plenty of time to refresh their memory involving Indiana Jones lore. Spanning over 40 years, there have been four Indiana Jones movies and one short-lived TV series. All five programs are available on streaming. Find out where to watch all the Indiana Jones movies and TV series below. Where to watch the Indiana Jones movies

Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All is not for the faint of heart. The coming-of-age movie follows two star-crossed lovers, Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet), as they set out on a road trip in 1980s America. There's a catch. Maren and Lee are cannibals, and they will look to satisfy their cravings for human flesh on this road trip.

When we first meet Maren, she is an 18-year-old outcast grappling with her new cannibalistic tendencies. Maren has experienced hardship and loss throughout her life, but because of her newfound love of the flesh, her father, Frank (André Holland), cannot protect her anymore. This leads Maren to seek out those in the same situation, leading her to strike up a relationship with Lee. Cannibalism and gore aside, Russell believes this is a story about what it's like to be "misunderstood."

Audiences love stories that pit plucky kids against horrible monsters -- whether it's aliens, zombies, ghosts, or various other supernatural threats. There's so much love for these stories, in fact, that it takes a special kind of film to stand out in the crowded "kids vs. monsters" genre these days.

Director Nyla Innuksuk's Slash/Back is one such film, and it delivers a uniquely clever, creepy-fun adventure, led by a talented cast of young actors.

Home » TV » TV Reviews

‘Anthracite’ Goes In Some Directions You Won’t Expect — And Some You Won’t Like

There are a couple of things you should know about Anthracite . The first is that it’s weird, and gets weirder as it goes at such an alarming rate you’d think it had entered a competition. And the second is that it’s bleak. It goes to some places that you a) won’t expect it to and b) will wish it didn’t.

Believe it or not, these aren’t criticisms. But forewarned is forearmed.

Approached with the correctly calibrated expectations, Anthracite is an impressively compelling French Netflix thriller that has the rare distinction of being impossible to predict on almost any level. Formal flourishes in the early episodes are abandoned in favor of rancid plot turns that put an impressive cast through the physical and emotional wringer. It’s likely that by the end, you won’t know quite what you’ve watched. But you’ll know you’ve watched something , that’s for sure.

I’ll only give an outline of the initial premise since little of it will matter in the way you’d expect anyway. Essentially, though, (almost) everything revolves around a cult in the French Alps village of Levionna, with its Christ-like leader Caleb Johansson (Stefano Cassetti) being the only survivor of a mass suicide.

Anthracite | Image via Netflix

Three decades later, journalist Solal Heilman (Jean-Marc Barr), who investigated the case at the time, returns to Levionna and promptly disappears. His internet sleuth daughter Ida (Noémie Schmidt) follows him out there and meets Jaro (Hatik), an employee at the ski resort who is of particular interest to Solal for mysterious reasons.

Before long, Jaro is implicated in a murder that has eerily similarities to one committed by Caleb back in the day, and the teens fall foul of Giovanna (Camille Lou), the obstinate local cop recovering from a recent mental breakdown.

Let’s stop there. It’s pointless getting carried away, and I don’t want to spoil anything even obliquely. Suffice it to say, all this is the tip of the iceberg, but one of the show’s distinct pleasures is seeing where each demented twist takes us.

It’s worth pointing out that the slightly goofy tone characterizing the opening episodes doesn’t persist. Things get far too serious far too quickly for Ida’s social ineptitude and team of always-online detectives to define things. Instead, the ballsier narrative swerves take the focus ahead of any formal flourishes.

I don’t say this about many shows, but Anthracite will probably be too much for some. Not too too much, like too difficult to watch or too appalling to consider, but objectively too much, like too many developments and reveals and reversals to keep track of. It can feel a little indulgent in its most outlandish moments as if it’s putting shock value and gotchas ahead of a meaningful plot.

It also can’t decide what it wants to be about. The story features cults, web sleuths, and embittered small-town locals shaking angry fists at exploitative companies, but it isn’t about any of these things any more than it’s about one thing after another.

It treats genre this way too. There are elements of coming-of-age, teen romance, cop dramas, and supernatural thrillers, sometimes within the span of a scene or two.

But these are quibbles, admittedly. The overarching mystery has a compelling backbone, while the performances are dynamic and interesting. The Alpine scenery is striking, and if shock value is considered a positive, well… Anthracite has that in spades.

It’ll be interesting to see how this divides audiences in the coming weeks since it certainly will, but it’ll also be enjoyable to see viewers really getting a kick out of its bigger swings. Just take the recommendation as a cautious one with some pretty big caveats.

I also broke down the ending of Anthracite in detail and recapped Season 1 (Episodes 1-6) individually. If you’re interested, obviously.

Is Anthracite Based On A True Story?

Article by Jonathon Wilson

Jonathon is one of the co-founders of Ready Steady Cut and has been an instrumental part of the team since its inception in 2017. Jonathon has remained involved in all aspects of the site’s operation, mainly dedicated to its content output, remaining one of its primary Entertainment writers while also functioning as our dedicated Commissioning Editor, publishing over 6,500 articles.

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Screen Rant

12 best final horror movie scenes of all time, ranked.

From triumphant escapes to bone-chillingly bleak conclusions, the best horror movie final scenes stayed with audiences long after the credits rolled.

Powerful final scenes in horror movies stick with audiences long after the credits roll.
Endings in horror films can be unpredictable and provide memorable conclusions.
Characters in horror movies often face fate and final moments that are both triumphant and terrifying.

The best final scenes from horror movies were powerful moments that stuck with audiences well after the credits rolled. A satisfying conclusion to a scary story was always a great thing, and horror movies can be notoriously difficult to end in a way that was both unpredictable and did the overall narrative justice. However, several horror movies managed to do just that and effectively used their final scenes to provide moments that would go down in horror history as some of the best conclusions ever depicted on the big screen.

The greatest final scenes from horror movies varied greatly and, while some used those moments as opportunities to set up sequels or franchises, others simply let the story end right there and sealed the fate of its characters forever. Final horror scenes can sometimes be triumphant moments for characters who, against the odds, managed to survive, or other times can be the last nail in the coffin of their doomed fate. No matter what, the best final horror movie scenes were always memorable and have stood the test of time.

12 The Shining (1980)

Jack torrance left frozen and trapped at overlook hotel forever, the shining.

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Stanley Kubrick's horror classic starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall tells the story of the Torrance family, who move to the isolated Overlook Hotel so that father Jack Torrance can act as its winter caretaker. Stuck at the hotel due to the winter storms, the malevolent supernatural forces inhabiting the building slowly begin to drive Jack insane, causing his wife and psychically gifted son to be caught up in a fight for their lives when Jack is pushed over the edge.

The Shining was one of the greatest horror movies ever made, and, even if the novel’s original writer Stephen King has his issues with Stanley Kubrick’s version , it still stood as a truly effective horror movie with an incredible ending. After being driven mad at the Overlook Hotel and attempting to kill his entire family, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) found himself desperately hunting his loved ones with an axe in a giant hedge maze. The tense atmosphere and suspenseful setting of the final act of The Shining only added to all the unnerving horror that came before.

After being unable to track down his victims Jack froze to death in the hedge maze, and in the final moments of The Shining , viewers caught a glimpse of a picture dated July 4, 1921, with Jack in among the hotel’s part guests. This cryptic ending hinted that Jack would remain just another spirit in the Overlook Hotel , remaining forever to haunt whichever unfortunate soul took up his position next. A powerful end to a deeply influential horror movie, The Shining was truly a cinematic triumph.

11 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Leatherface still chasing his victim and flailing his chainsaw as the sun rose, the texas chainsaw massacre.

The low-budget independent slasher movie The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a horror cult classic that was made even more frightening by its real-life inspiration. Drawing on the horrific story of the serial killer Ed Gein , the antagonist of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre Leatherface was a fearsome killer who ruthlessly pursued his unfortunate victims. As a large hulking figure who used power to tools to kill his victims, the masked villain Leatherface was truly the stuff of nightmares.

Leatherface’s threatening demeanor was made more effective by the final scene of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , which saw him still chasing his victim. After having escaped the horror that was Leatherface’s home his planned victim Sally Hardestry made it to safety in a passing truck, but this did not stop Leatherface from running after her as he flailed his chainsaw before the credits rolled. The fact that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre ended with Leatherface still alive and out for blood set the series up for sequels but also left viewers with the unnerving feeling he could be anywhere.

10 Carrie (1976)

Sue snell was haunted by the guilt she felt for the death of carrie white, carrie (1976).

Carrie told a powerful story about a shy girl who was pushed too far by her bullying peers and contained an ending that was liable to keep viewers up at night. With an exceptional performance from Sissy Spacek in the title role , Carrie was a bittersweet movie that played with audiences’ emotions as Carrie was built up by those around her, only to be brought crashing down by mean vindictiveness. In the lead to the final dream sequence conclusion, Carrie caused havoc in her high school and used her telekinesis powers to destroy her house, killing her mother and herself.

In the final scene of Carrie viewers followed Sue Snell, the popular high school student whose remorseful goodwill led to Carrie’s ultimate demise. In an effective dream sequence, Sue visited Carrie’s grave only for her bloodied arm to reach out from the rubble and grab her in the movie’s most effective jump scare. A fiercely powerful ending, Sue was left screaming as her mother consoled her and audiences were left with the perception that the sad story of Carrie White will haunt those effected for the rest of their lives.

9 Drag Me To Hell (2009)

Drag me to hell delivered on its title, drag me to hell.

Drag Me To Hell is a supernatural horror movie directed by Sam Raimi where loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is cursed by the elderly Mrs. Ganush (Lorna Raver) after refusing to extend the lady's mortgage. Christine must find a way to escape Lamia, the demon who tries to literally drag her to the depths of Hell.

After three consecutive Spider-Man movies, director Sam Rami returned to the horror genre where he first made a name for himself and delivered a fun and satirical mortality tale called Drag Me to Hell . Telling the story of a young loan officer refusing an elderly lady's request for an extension on her mortgage, Drag Me to Hell showcased the consequences of a deadly curse that the old woman placed on her. Made shortly after the financial crash of 2008, Drag Me to Hell highlighted contemporaries' anxieties about money with a powerful ending that viewers should have seen coming.

The title was a dead giveaway for the final scene of Drag Me to Hell as, just when everything appeared to have worked out for loan officer Christine Brown, she came face-to-face with her past sins and paid the deadly price for them. The final scene of Drag Me to Hell revealed that the curse was never lifted the gates of fiery gates of hell opened and Christine was dragged in to suffer for eternity. A shocking ending that confounded all expectations, audiences were left in absolute shock as the credits to Drag Me to Hell rolled .

8 The Wicker Man (1973)

The ritual sacrifice takes place, the wicker man.

The Wicker Man is a horror film released in 1973 and follows Police Sergeant Neil Howie, who heads to an island on the coast of Scottland in search of a missing girl. Howie discovers that the disappearance is related to a pagan society that conflicts with his Christian values - but his continued search leads him to the heart of something sinister.

The British folk horror movie The Wicker Man was a cult classic that bore plenty of similarities to the later Ari Aster sleeper horror hit Midsommar . An atmospheric horror movie that told the story of a police officer investigating a missing girl on an isolated Scottish island, The Wicker Man slowly built towards its epic conclusion as the unnerving reality of the island revealed itself bit by bit. With a population that had abandoned Christianity in favor of pagan beliefs, The Wicker Man was a fearful story a man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

With a need to offer a ritual sacrifice to their pagan gods, Sgt. Neil Howie found himself at the center of a ceremony that saw him burn to death inside a giant wicker man statue while the creepy population sang ancient English folk music. This unnerving conclusion came as a terror-inducing shock, as The Wicker Man subjected horror tropes of the noble lawman making it out alive . A majorly effective ending, in the years since its release , The Wicker Man has imbued itself in popular culture and even influenced modern festivals like Burning Man in the United States.

The Wicker Man received an American remake in 2006 which was directed by Neil LaBute and starred Nicolas Cage as the doomed police officer.

7 The Sixth Sense (1999)

A classic m. night shyamalan twist is revealed, the sixth sense.

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, The Sixth Sense is a psychological thriller about a young boy who can see and communicate with ghosts. Bruce Willis as Dr. Malcolm Crowe, a child psychologist who tries to help Cole, played by Haley Joel Osment, while grappling with his own personal demons. The movie features a twist ending that has become iconic in pop culture.

Today, the twist ending of The Sixth Sense has solidified itself as a touchstone of popular culture as the phrase “ I see dead people ” stood as one of cinema’s most famous quotes . However, when The Sixth Sense was first released this psychological horror kept viewers on the edge of their seats and left them gobsmacked with its surprise conclusion. After it was revealed that Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) had been dead for much of the film, it recontextualized the entire narrative of The Sixth Sense and signaled writer and director M. Night Shyamalan as a major new voice in Hollywood.

While Shyamalan would later become known for his twist endings, when The Sixth Sense was released, nobody saw it coming.

The conclusion of The Sixth Sense saw Crowe finally come to terms with his true fate as he returned home to his wife and discovered he was no longer wearing his wedding ring and that he did not survive the shooting earlier in the movie. This mic drop moment was the most memorable part of The Sixth Sense as the modern ghost story came full circle with a satisfyingly spooking ending. While Shyamalan would later become known for his twist endings , when The Sixth Sense was released, nobody saw it coming.

6 Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Rosemary bore the child of satan, rosemary's baby.

Directed by Roman Polanski and starring Mia Farrow, Rosemary's Baby chronicles the chilling tale of Rosemary Woodhouse, the wife of an actor who, after finding out she is pregnant, begins to suspect that her unborn child is something far more sinister than a normal baby. John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, and Maurice Evans also star.

Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby was truly one of the most unnerving movies to come out of the 1960s and has maintained its power to frighten and horrify viewers right up to modern times. Starring Mia Farrow as the unfortunate Rosemary, a woman whose Satanic neighbors groomed her to bear the child of Satan, Rosemary’s Baby was a psychological horror that got to the very heart of human fear and anxiety. As Rosemary’s Baby built toward its terrifying conclusion all the groundwork had been laid for it to scare with maximum effect.

The final scene of Rosemary’s Baby saw Rosemary coming face-to-face with her child and in shock and horror she realized that her worst nightmare had come true. As she screamed “ what have you done to its eyes ?” a neighbor told her the baby had his father’s eyes, which showcased that Rosemary had given birth to the offspring of the Devil himself. The fact that the baby was never shown on screen made this conclusion all the more terrifying, as viewers could only imagine what kind of horrid creature had entered the world.

5 Hereditary (2018)

Hail paimon.

The feature film debut of writer-director Ari Aster, Hereditary tells the story of the unwittingly cursed Graham family. Annie Graham (Toni Collette) lives with her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and their children Peter (Alex Wolff) and Charlie (Milly Shapiro). After the death of Annie's mother, the family is beset by disaster and stalked by a supernatural entity that dredges up a past that Annie had spent her life trying to overlook.

While the ending of Hereditary was open to interpretation when taken at its most literal it was still a shocking conclusion that spread fear and terror into the minds of horrified viewers. Ari Aster’s story of a grief-stricken family had many shocking moments throughout, which as the sudden decapitation of 13-year-old Charlie Graham, but nothing compared to the unnerving horror of the final scene in Hereditary . As all the pieces of its complex story came together, the ending of Hereditary proved just how much its characters had been manipulated.

The final scene of Hereditary showcased that Annie’s mother was deeply involved in the occult as her son Peter Graham was revealed to be a vessel for the return of the demon king Paimon. At its core Hereditary was the story of a family in crisis and this shocking supernatural and demonic ending brought up as many as it answered. While plenty of audience members have been left dumbfounded by what it all meant, the ending of Hereditary was rife with symbolic meaning and its terrifying end note was a memorably bleak conclusion.

4 The Mist (2007)

David drayton’s devastating choice.

Stephen King's terrifying novel is brought to the screen with The Mist - a horror-thriller film directed by Frank Darabont. When a small town suddenly sees a giant rolling fog arrive, they show mere curiosity. But when people begin to die mysteriously within, several survivors hold up in a grocery store as they attempt to find a way out and survive - unfortunately, the dangers don't just come from outside- they also come from within.

Having already directed the excellent Stephen King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile , director Frank Darabont told an exceedingly bleak tale with his version of The Mist . As a terrifying monster movie that exploited the fear of the unknown, The Mist built toward its shocking ending scene with so slow calculated precision, as viewers gradually realized the doomed nature of its characters. With seemingly no other choice, the final moments of The Mist were far more horrific than most horror movies dared to portray.

Having done everything he could to escape the mysterious mist that shrouded sinister creatures from another dimension, David Drayton felt he was left with no other choice than to kill his son and three companions to avoid them falling victim to a far more gruesome death at the hands of the monsters. However, after David killed his child, he was confronted by the U.S. army who had arrived to save the day. The dour final scene of The Mist showcased that if David had waited a few moments longer, his son and the rest of the survivors could have lived.

3 The Blair Witch Project (1999)

An ambiguous ending, the blair witch project.

The found-footage horror of The Blair Witch Project ended on an ambiguous note that left many questions about what had actually occurred. Through the story of three student filmmakers who wandered through the woods to investigate the legend of the Blair Witch, the film was a surprise horror hit that led to countless imitators in the years since its release. The power of The Blair Witch Project came from the ingenious way it utilized the fear of the unknown , as the titular Blair Witch remained unseen throughout the movie.

The Blair Witch Project presented itself as the real found footage of the three investigating students as they interviewed locals about the legend and stepped ever closer toward danger. The final scene saw the group get split up from one another as fearful screams hinted that the creature had finally caught up with them and as the camera cuts out the fate of its characters was never revealed. This ambiguous ending allowed audiences to fill in the gaps themselves, and as was usually the case, the horrors that can be conjured in the mind were always the most terrifying.

2 Alien (1979)

Ripley ejected the xenomorph into space, alien (1979).

Alien is a sci-fi horror-thriller by director Ridley Scott that follows the crew of a spaceship known as the Nostromo. After the staff of the merchant's vessel perceives an unknown transmission as a distress call, its landing on the source moon finds one of the crew members attacked by a mysterious lifeform, and they soon realize that its life cycle has merely begun.

Alien was a sci-fi horror classic that spawned an entire franchise depicting the deadly extraterrestrial lifeform known as the Xenomorph species. As a claustrophobic story about the Nostromo crew who were trapped inside their spaceship with an aggressive alien creature who was loose onboard, Alien gradually killed off its characters one by one as it built toward its grand conclusion. With continuously building suspense, the warrant officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) ended up as the last survivor as Alien entered its iconic final scene.

Having already defied the odds by surviving so long, Ripley discovered the alien was still on board and in a powerful moment was able to eject the creature out of the ship and into space. This final scene came as a moment of pure relief following the unnerving narrative that had just unfolded. Ripley’s survival and the final defeat of the Xenomorph was a highly satisfying conclusion after the horrific stress that was much of Alien . However, this was not the end for the Xenomorph species as they continued to appear throughout the Alien franchise.

1 The Thing (1982)

The final conclusion benefited all of humanity, the thing (1982).

A team of researchers set out to study an alien spacecraft found in Antarctica, where they also discover an alien body on the site. The alien buried in ice is actually alive and has the ability to imitate human form. The group must find a way to distinguish who the real person is from The Thing and stay alive. John Carpenter's 1982 film is a remake of 1951's The Thing from Another World and stars Kurt Russel as the hero RJ MacReady.

John Carpenter’s The Thing was one of the greatest horror movies ever made and its final scene truly lived up to this lofty legacy. With an ambiguous conclusion that featured Kurt Russell's MacReady and Keith David's Childs in complete distrust of one another, The Thing brought audiences right back to the beginning and gave no easy answers as to who the space-shifting alien creature truly was. While an ambiguous ending can often be frustrating, it worked perfectly for The Thing and was one of the reasons the movie has maintained its iconic legacy almost 40 years since its release.

“ Why don’t we just wait here for a little while and see what happens .”

As the two characters struggled to figure out a solution to their mutual distrust of one another, MacReady delivered the iconic line: “ Why don’t we just wait here for a little while and see what happens .” This indecision led the two to share a bottle of whiskey as they froze to death for the benefit of all humanity. While the conclusion of The Thing may have appeared like a bleak ending , it also signaled the sacrificial nature of the human spirit and those who were willing to suffer for the greater good.

'Romeo' movie review: Impressive performances elevate this all-too-familiar story

CHENNAI : The name ‘Romeo’ has now become synonymous with a hopeless romantic. While Shakespeare’s Romeo had a lot more to him than this description, the name has been reduced to just this over the years. In his latest film, 'Romeo', Vijay Antony embodies a modern interpretation of this character. While his performance is captivating, the film’s plot lacks originality.

In a way, 'Romeo' resembles a few Shah Rukh Khan films. 'Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi’s trope of a man inventing a new persona to win over his resentful wife is similar to the plot of 'Romeo'. Shah Rukh’s fear of fire in 'Om Shanthi Om', and the iconic scene in which he tries to save his loved one from a burning palace, also resembles a scene in 'Romeo'. Elements from 'Kaavalan' and 'Mouna Ragam' can also be found. But despite these all too familiar tropes, 'Romeo' holds promise. While the plot may lack originality, it still makes up for it with a light-hearted, entertaining experience.

The film kicks off with a tightly woven first half that, despite its familiarity, consistently tickles our funny bones and maintains a high momentum throughout. While VTV Ganesh and Yogi Babu take on the roles of the primary comedians, supporting actors such as Roju, Shalini, Siva Sha Ra, and even the lead, Vijay Antony, inject refreshing and eccentric humour into the mix.

Moreover, the film embraces meta elements, with Vijay Antony and VTV Ganesh tossing in self-referential jokes. For instance, when the age gap between Arivu and Leela is playfully teased, Arivu quips, “Yean indha Arya, Vijay Antony, ivangalaan pathu vayasu vidhyaasathula Kalyanam panalaya?” In another scene, when Arivu seeks help from his uncle VTV Ganesh, there’s a subtle reference to Ganesh’s character helping out Simbhu in 'Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa'. However, the film isn’t entirely devoid of cliched lines, such as, “Ponnunga thaali kattum bodhu azhuvanga, yean na adhukaprom vaazhkai full aah aamblainga namma dhaane azha porom?”

Vijay Antony’s characterisation in 'Romeo' seems like he is almost in a new avatar. Ever since India Pakistan, the actor has been playing a series of serious roles, breaking the streak with this light-hearted and romantic character. In 'Romeo', his character Arivu is portrayed as nerdy yet deeply devoted to his wife. Arivu stands out as the green flag in a sea of red flags, exemplifying qualities that Leela perhaps doesn’t fully appreciate. Vijay Antony has unlocked his wacky, vivacious side to fully fit into the shoes of Arivu. However, there’s a moment in the film where this refreshing characterization takes a slight step back. In a scene where Arivu, typically portrayed as coy and timid, beats up a man who tries to wrong his wife, the narrative falls back on the damsel-in-distress trope. This conflicts with another scene in which Arivu questions, “Oru ponna adicha avan aambalai aayiduvana?” It makes you wonder if there are only certain stereotypical tropes that filmmakers can use to portray heroism.

The film is a mixed bag, yet it undeniably marks a breakthrough for Mrinalini. She embodies a determined young woman, relentlessly pursuing her dreams despite facing numerous challenges. What sets her portrayal apart is the absence of any pity-inducing scenes. Instead, the audience connects with her passion and resilience, finding themselves rooting for her despite her perpetually angry demeanour. Leela is a well-written character, albeit with a few loose ends, and Mrinalini’s portrayal adds an endearing, girl-next-door quality to her, making her all the more relatable.

Barath Dhanasekar’s background score, particularly in the first half of the film, adds an intriguing dimension to the narrative. I quite grooved to his upbeat remix of ‘Marumagale Marumagale Vaa Vaa’. While the other songs were mesmeric, the editing choices occasionally overshadowed their quality. Songs like ‘Vethala’ disrupt the flow of the narrative, appearing at moments when we’re eager for the story to progress. Additionally, certain prolonged scenes in the second half could have been trimmed to sustain the pace of the film.

'Romeo' is certainly flawed, just like the namesake character from Shakespeare’s classic. Its derivative nature cuts down on our intrigue of “Will they, won’t they.” Yet, it tries to bring in some originality with portions like Arivu’s childhood trauma. While the story is familiar, Vinayak Vathianathan manages to present it in a fresh light, offering a clean comic entertainer that falls somewhere between dazzling and underwhelming. At the end of the day, 'Romeo' has a happy ending that makes for a quality family watch on a long weekend. And hey, at least it’s not as tragic as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Film: Romeo

Director : Vinayak Vaithianathan

Cast: Vijay Antony, Mrinalini Ravi, VTV Ganesh, Yogi Babu, Thalaivasal Vijay, Roju, Shalini, Siva Sha Ra, Ilavarasu

Rating: 3/5

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Johnny Oleksinski

‘civil war’ review: a torturous, overrated movie without a point.

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Running time: 109 minutes. Rated R (strong violent content, bloody/disturbing images and language throughout). In theaters.

All director Alex Garland had to do was title his new movie “Civil War” for it to instantly be deemed Very Important by tastemakers.

Who cares that the script is lousy? Or that the acting is monotonous? Or that the story amounts to a series of gruesome killings that you’d rather not sit through?

Doesn’t matter. It’s essential!

The gnarly film is about a modern-day domestic war in America and is, therefore, a prescient warning to us all, we’ve already been told with conspicuous enthusiasm by lefty newspaper op-eds.

They insist: You, too, could soon be tied up at a roadside gas station and tortured by dudes with Southern drawls.

But really Garland’s movie is no more vital to the discourse than “ The Purge ,” and is about 1% as entertaining.

“Civil War’s” shtick is that it’s not specifically political.

For instance, as the US devolves into enemy groups of secessionist states, Texas and California have banded together to form the Western Forces. That such an alliance could ever occur is about as likely as Sweetgreen/Kentucky Fried Chicken combo restaurant.

Still, one deadly encounter with a soldier played by Jesse Plemons leaves no doubts about what actual party he is supposed to represent.

The Western Forces are duking it out with the loyalist states who follow the president (Nick Offerman) — a fascist in an illegal third term — as well as the Florida Alliance and the New People’s Army.

Lest you arrive expecting cool battles, the fights are mostly just three or four guys shooting three or four other guys until a slightly bigger clash at the end. All we get are tiny tussles in a war supposedly affecting 350 million people.

Garland, with his incessant vagueness, is clearly aiming to keep the story universal rather than divisive.

However, considering his movie is set in a land of folks who love to discuss and argue about the news, it’s odd that none of the characters ever give concrete details about what’s going on. How did this conflict start? What does anybody stand for? Who knows?

Avoiding the elephant (and donkey) in the room makes the whole shebang feel fake, with the help of some lethargic actors.

Our guides through this not-believable hellscape are a quartet of unlikable war journalists whose lives we barely learn about beyond their resumes.

Kirsten Dunst plays Lee Smith , a hardened frontline photographer for Reuters who’s become numbed to violence and danger over the years.

Joel (Wagner Moura) is her reporter sidekick, who gets a thrill out of the battlefield … until he doesn’t. Moura’s performance, by the way, leads me to believe his numbskull journo couldn’t convince a telemarketer to talk to him.

Stephen McKinley Henderson is an aging New York Times writer named Sammy, who’s just about had enough. And Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) is a young, aspiring fotog who worships Smith and tags along for the ride.

They embark on a road trip from New York City — which is being bombed — to Washington, DC, in an attempt to interview the press-hating president who is hiding out in the White House.

The plot plods along — they drive a bit, guy gets shot, they drive some more, guy gets shot — and the dialogue is bottom of the barrel.

At one point, Joel walks into a clothing store in an eerily calm small town and says, “Are you guys aware that there’s a pretty big civil war going on all across America?”

This is what the New York Times called “a terrifying premonition of American collapse”!

Dunst is the best of the four performers , but a bitter, been-there-done-that reporter is such an old cliche. She adds nothing new to the archetype except her name.

A movie about a fictional second civil war isn’t a terrible idea, I’ll grant.

But how about instead of torturing viewers with a parade of point-blank executions, Garland tries making a well-executed film?

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'Blackout' Review: A Werewolf Horror Movie Without Any Bite

This creature feature doesn't leave much of a mark.

The Big Picture

Blackout fails to build tension in a werewolf plot, veering towards a Hallmark Channel drama.
The film underutilizes impressive werewolf makeup and offers limited monster appearances.
Blackout struggles to balance being gory and introspective, leaving viewers searching for depth.

It’s not often that werewolves get to take center stage anymore . Usually, they’re overtaken by their equally bloodthirsty but arguably more attractive cousin the vampire , who’s featured in everything from Love Bites to Interview With the Vampire . Werewolves often take a back seat in the genre’s gory action in favor of Lestat or even the Gill Man, but they get their fair share of love from horror fans too. One of those, notably, is character actor Larry Fessenden , who’s hopped behind the camera to give audiences his own take on the lycanthropic monsters in Blackout .

Blackout (2024)

In the grip of a citywide blackout, a terrifying truth emerges—a werewolf is on the loose. As night falls, a hardened police officer and an expert in mythical predators team up to hunt the creature terrorizing the blackout-stricken city, unraveling a deeper mystery behind its sudden appearance.

Fessenden’s film, which he wrote, directed, and edited, follows Alex Hurt ’s Charley, an alcoholic painter who’s looking to escape his life. He’s cut off his fiance, sold his home, and dumped his deceased father’s things off with a lawyer in an attempt to take down a corrupt businessman in his rural hometown — one who blames a series of mysterious killings on the migrant workers building his new hilltop resort. From the start, it seems like your average, run-of-the-mill small-town drama …that is, if you ignore the wolfish kill sequence that opens the film.

See, Charley has a secret: three nights a month, he transforms into a (still somehow bipedal) werewolf, attacking anyone who crosses his path. He can’t remember anything when he wakes , but has a sneaking suspicion about his lycanthropic nature. As a result, he’s on a mission to escape: not to any particular place, but life itself, commissioning a friend to make him silver bullets so he can die by suicide in maybe the most meta way possible.

'Blackout' Is a Lackluster Werewolf Movie

Unfortunately, all of the tension you’d think would be present in a man struggling with his own monstrosity is shockingly absent . Blackout is a bizarre production from someone who’s so heavily involved in the horror genre. It plays like a Hallmark Channel take on a werewolf movie, in that I know far more about the racist small town politics of Talbot Falls than I do about Charley and his inner life, minus his suicidal, lycanthropy-related tendencies.

Maybe it’s just that I come from a small town (one where I wouldn’t be overly surprised to find a werewolf lurking in the extensive woods), but the script reads like a city kid’s take on backwoods America . Sure, we probably have monsters lurking around every corner — hell, I’m sure my grandparents’ house is haunted — but the stereotyped construction most films come up with is a far cry from the truth, at least when there’s nothing else layered over top of it. Fessenden’s script is thin as wet newspaper, and long, drawn-out sequences of blue-collar workers arguing about nothing in particular bleeds the already boring film dry, much like Charley does to his victims.

It almost seems like Twilight has a better mastery of the supernatural/small town balance, a prospect that I think would give my teenage self a heart attack. The disconnect between the natural and the supernatural is so strong that it very nearly feels like two different movies mashed into one — a problem that seems to happen a distressing amount in contemporary horror, for which I have no explanation. There are a couple of familiar faces that brighten the viewing experience, notably scream queen Barbara Crampton and Motell Gyn Foster , but everyone else is a cardboard cutout of stereotypes, from the benevolent preacher to the racist bigwig businessman to the noble police officer. Charley’s affliction is very nearly treated as afterthought , if not for the string of murders tying him back to the small town’s constant infighting.

For a Monster Movie, There Aren’t Many Monsters in 'Blackout'

As a result, the film makes suprisingly little use of its rather impressive werewolf makeup , which despite only being facial prosthetics and some gnarly pointed fingernails (at least, as far as I could see in its limited glimpses) gave off what I imagine was exactly the intended effect, plus a little. It differentiates itself from the Lon Chaney and Rick Baker designs of Wolfmans past, so it’s a shame that it’s damn-near impossible to see, and isn’t given much time to shine in a movie where it should — at least in my mind — be its centerpiece. Kill sequences are reduced to a matter of seconds — the longest lasts no more than a minute, as far as I can recall — which seems like the antithesis of the point. Don’t we go to monster movies expecting to see the monsters themselves?

It’s clear that Fessenden loves werewolves, loves making scary movies, and has a good handle on letting his actors be actors , but that means that nearly every other aspect of the project suffers . He’s juggling too many balls, and to be entirely honest, Fessenden’s final project doesn’t feel too far off from a student film. With attention in so many different places, the full piece feels sparse, with not enough detail added to give it the proper, bloody oomph a werewolf like Charley deserves.

Monster films are fully capable of being gorey, goopy scarefests meant to do nothing more than make you jump out of your seat, and maybe shriek a bit if you’re as sensitive as me. They’re a cornerstone of Hollywood all the way back to the days of the studio system, and it's far from me to disparage anyone for indulging in that. But Fessenden’s film rides a strange line between a gorefest and a more introspective kind of horror, never fully committing to one or the other. It leaves you searching for any amount of meaning in the text, if only to justify the hundred minutes you spent watching it.

Then again, Blackout doesn’t seem like it falls too far afield of what most genre fans seem to enjoy , or at least expect from indie films. Horror is the only genre I can think of that firmly embraces the schlocky and the bad, and makes it a cornerstone of its existence. (I’d know, my favorite is Slumber Party Massacre 2 .) Blackout hits all of those notes, the ones that feel eerily familiar to anyone who watched Elvira or Svengoolie growing up. And having screened the film at Overlook Film Festival, I’m sure there were others who felt exactly that way. I can’t say I’d recommend it to them by any stretch of the imagination, but more power to them, I guess.

Blackout is a werewolf movie with plenty of passion behind it that still doesn't pack the punch it needs to.

The werewolf makeup is often impressive.
For the most part, most of the kills are too fleeting to leave an impact.
While it tries to explore small-two problems, the film lacks nuance.
Even as it seems built to be more introspective, Blackout is not committed enough to see this through.

Blackout is now available to stream on VOD in the U.S.

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All 11 Fight Scenes In Road House 2024, Ranked

Hard-hitting fight scenes with expert precision make the new 'Road House' a thrilling watch for action lovers.
Elwood Dalton's ruthless tactics and tragic past add an edge to the chaotic violence in the remake.
Director Doug Liman makes the fight scenes leap out from the screen.

Just like the original movie starring Patrick Swayze, the new remake of Road House features plenty of brilliant fight scenes. The 1989 version of Road House is the ultimately guilty pleasure movie, packed with scenes of lowlife scum getting summarily beaten down by a stoic bouncer. The remake recaptures this crowd-pleasing feel, but it also features fight scenes which are laced with incredible tension. There are plenty of differences between the two movies, not least Dalton's UFC past in the 2024 version, but the remake is just as chaotically violent.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Elwood Dalton, a former UFC champion who retired after killing an opponent in the ring. Rather than cobbling together an unsatisfying life scaring underground MMA fighters out of their winnings, Dalton takes a job as a bouncer at a rowdy bar in the Florida Keys. Road House has been receiving positive reviews , and its hard-hitting fight scenes are a big reason why. Director Doug Liman previously worked on the action thrillers The Bourne Identity and Edge of Tomorrow , and he makes Road House 's fight scenes leap out from the screen.

Road House is available to stream now on Amazon Prime Video.

Road House Review: Doug Liman's Remake Is Bigger, Louder & Slightly Dumber Than The Original

Dalton breaking jack's fingers, dalton can incapacitate people with surgical precision.

Dalton often shows signs of his incredible understanding of human anatomy, presumably learned from years as a professional fighter. He knows exactly how to inflict the most damage with the absolute minimum effort, and this is how he turns the table on Jack when he pulls a gun on him. Jack thinks that waving a gun at Dalton will be enough to force him into his car, but Dalton doesn't break a sweat. He tells Jack very calmly that all he needs to do is break his index finger and his middle finger, and he follows through.

Dalton's Throat-Punch Kill

Dalton stops holding back after brandt's men burn down the book store.

One other instance of Dalton using his knowledge of the human body is when he kills Vince with a single punch to the throat. He explains that he's probably broken his hyoid bone and collapsed his trachea, but either result will stop him being able to breathe. It's an uncharacteristically cold-blooded moment from Dalton, and it suggests that mentally he could be back on the path to the dark place that saw him kill one of his opponents in the ring. This moment could be a tribute to the original Road House , in which Dalton rips out a man's throat.

Dell Being Killed By The Crocodile

Dell thinks he has the upper hand on dalton, but he ends up being eaten.

Dell doesn't take his initial loss to Dalton lightly. As soon as he's out of the hospital, he tries to run Dalton down in his car. When that doesn't work, he ambushes Dalton on his boat, aptly named "the Boat," with a shotgun in his hand. Just as Jack finds out, having a gun doesn't necessarily give you the advantage over Dalton in a fight. Dalton quickly disarms Dell and knocks him overboard. He tries to rescue him before a crocodile snaps him up, but he's too late. As everyone in Glass Key knows, "crocs hide their food."

Dalton & Ellie Fighting Brandt On His Boat

The waves level the playing field.

As Brandt tries to escape from his burning yacht, he takes a smaller speedboat with Ellie alongside as a hostage. Dalton commandeers Knox's boat and tracks him down, and he teams up with Ellie to fight Brandt as the boat is tossed around by the ocean. The waves add some extra jeopardy to the fight, but Brandt is no real fighter. If it was a regular fight on flat ground, Dalton probably could have killed him in seconds. He loses control of the boat before too long and gets catapulted into the bar, setting up Road House 's ending .

18 Best Jake Gyllenhaal Movies, Ranked

Billy breaking up a fight at the road house, dalton's apprentice learns how to take out the trash.

Rather than taking on every rowdy customer who comes to the bar, Dalton decides to train Billy and Reef as bouncers so that they can deal with the everyday troublemakers. They could hardly ask for a better teacher, as shown by how quickly their skills develop. Dalton is surprisingly hands-off in his approach. He tells Billy exactly what to do when a fight breaks out and one man has a concealed knife. Billy takes a big step back and pops him in the nose. Dalton can leave later knowing that the Road House is in safe hands.

Dalton's Career-Ending UFC Fight

Road house's ufc scenes use real-life fighters and pundits.

Director Doug Liman uses POV shots in Dalton's darkest moments, and his fight with Harris is the darkest of all.

Conor McGregor isn't the only UFC fighter in Road House . Jay Hieron plays Jax "Jetway" Harris, Dalton's opponent in his championship bout. Road House drip feeds the story of Dalton's fight throughout the movie. Eventually, it becomes clear why the event haunts Dalton's dreams. Dalton kills Harris in the ring by refusing to stop. Director Doug Liman uses POV shots in Dalton's darkest moments, and his fight with Harris is the darkest of all. The spectacle of the big occasion makes Dalton's trauma even worse. The cameras flash around him as he begins to understand what he has just done.

Post Malone's Bareknuckle Boxing Fight

The rapper is surprisingly convincing in his cameo.

Post Malone is one of the most surprising members of the Road House cast , along with Conor McGregor. He plays Carter, a bareknuckle fighter in the movie's first scene. Fittingly, the movie opens with a punch to the face, as Carter takes down a much larger opponent. The ring announcer claims that Carter has taken down six challengers in a row, but he backs down from fighting Dalton when he recognizes who he is. Road House starts with a bang , immediately signaling its intention to be just as action-packed as the 1989 original.

Knox Destroying The Bar With A Golf Club

Conor mcgregor's introduction shakes things up.

As soon as Conor McGregor is introduced as Knox, strutting boldly down the street in the nude, Road House kicks into another gear.

As soon as Conor McGregor is introduced as Knox, strutting boldly down the street in the nude, Road House kicks into another gear. He throws his weight around with Brandt's crew before strolling into the Road House like he owns it with a golf club in his hands. Knox brings a whirlwind of chaos with him, smashing glasses as he almost dances his way through the bar. He seems to enjoy violence and pain, and he picks fights with bystanders just to cause a nuisance. He even tears through the netting which protects the band.

Knox & Dalton's First Road House Fight

Dalton meets his match at last.

After Dalton decides that Knox's antics have gone too far, he steps in to confront him. Despite the chaos all around them as an all-out bar fight ensues, Knox and Dalton remain utterly focused on one another. Their fight is the first time that Dalton truly seems like he's in danger. Even being stabbed in the abdomen and hit by a train is less threatening than Knox tossing him behind the bar and slamming his fists through glass bottles as if they are made of tissue paper. Dalton walks away from the Road House, seemingly defeated.

Road House 2024 Soundtrack Guide: Every Song & When They Play

Dalton taking down dell's gang at the road house, dalton finally shows what he's capable of.

Dalton's legend precedes him everywhere he goes , and this builds him up to be a fearsome warrior before he ever even throws a punch. Carter quits his fight as soon as he sees Dalton in the ring, and Billy says he is a big fan as soon as he meets him. Dalton has a lot to live up to, and his first fight scene shows that he's worthy of the hype. He asks Dell if he has medical insurance first, and then he brutally dispatches him and his four friends. Dalton's bone-cracking, head-smashing skills are put on display for all to see, but he never breaks a sweat.

Dalton & Knox's Final Showdown

Road house's final fight is also its best.

Dalton and Knox's second fight is a beautifully choreographed mixture of MMA mastery and sheer power.

Road House saves the very best for last. Knox and Dalton's final fight is just as incredible as the first one, but Dalton no longer reins in his killer instincts. Their fight is a beautifully choreographed mixture of MMA mastery and sheer power. They tumble around the ruins of the bar, grappling on the floor for a while, before both tiring and going blow-for-blow with the power of two heavyweight boxers. When Dalton seems finished, he draws on something extra to fight back and brutally stabs Knox with two broken pieces of wood. Road House 's post-credits scene shows Knox alive, setting up a potential rematch for the pair.

All 11 Fight Scenes In Road House 2024, Ranked

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Bones and All: Directed by Luca Guadagnino. With Kendle Coffey, Taylor Russell, André Holland, Ellie Parker. A young woman embarks on a 1000 mile odyssey through America where she meets a disenfranchised drifter. But all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and to a final stand that will determine whether love can survive their otherness.
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