Review: 'Bones and All' is a bloody and beautiful horror-romance, about young cannibals in love and on the run

In the long list of movies about lovers on the run — from the sweetly innocent (“Moonrise Kingdom”) to the homicidal (“Natural Born Killers”), with “Breathless,” “True Romance,” “Queen & Slim” and countless others in between — it’s hard to think of one that is simultaneously as romantic and as horrific as “Bones and All.”

And, because it’s directed by Luca Guadagnino, who has done both romance (“I Am Love,” “Call Me By Your Name”) and horror (“Suspiria”) exceedingly well, it’s no surprise that the movie is by turns beautiful and chilling.

When we first meet Maren (Taylor Russell), she’s a shy new girl at a Virginia high school in the early 1980s. She’s happy to be invited to a slumber party by one of her classmates, and all seems to be going well, until she starts biting the finger off one of the girls.

Racing back home, Maren’s father (André Holland) tells her to start packing, and within hours they have crossed into Maryland. They’re not there long before Maren discovers her father has abandoned her — leaving behind some cash, Maren’s birth certificate, and a cassette tape in which Dad tries to explain what he’s kept hidden from his daughter.

In short, Maren is a cannibal, and feels the compulsion occasionally to feed on the flesh of her fellow humans. Left on the streets, Maren learns two important facts: 1) She can smell other cannibals from a long distance, and 2) they can smell her, and there’s an underground community of them. The first one she encounters, a creepy dude named Sully (Mark Rylance), explains that they call themselves “eaters.”

After sharing a meal with Sully, Maren hops onto a bus heading to the Midwest — in hopes of finding her birth mother, listed on her birth certificate, and last known to be living in Minnesota.

Maren meets other eaters — even though they tend to maintain their distance from one another, to keep from drawing suspicion. One of them is Lee (played by Timotheé Chalamet), a handsome drifter, and the two soon go from traveling companions to lovers.

The scenes with Russell and Chalamet are hauntingly beautiful, as they travel through the heartland in moments that evoke Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” two young people in love and occasionally killing people.

Guadagnino, working with screenwriter David Kajganich (who wrote “A Bigger Splash” and the “Suspiria” remake) to adapt Camille DeAngelis’ novel, follows the road-movie playbook to stirring effect. Maren and Lee meet some chilling characters, and Guadagnino employs actors he’s worked with before — including Michael Stuhlbarg, Jessica Harper and Chloë Sevigny — to create some white-knuckle moments. None are more blood-curdling than Rylance’s performance, though.

“Bones and All” is not for the squeamish, but for those who can go the distance with it, it’s bloody brilliant.

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‘Bones and All’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 23, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong, bloody and disturbing violent content, language throughout, some sexual content and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 130 minutes.