Sometimes, a film can reinvigorate or define a genre, Interview With The Vampire was able to do so for vampire films. With Bones and All, we are hoping that Cannibal films will follow suit. Directed by Luca Guadagnino from a screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis, the story is of finding one’s community, and about finding love. Maren (Taylor Russle) and her father, Frank (André Holland) moved to town in 1988. Maren is a cannibal, and she cannot stop her urges, during a sleepover for instance, she bit off a girl’s finger. The pair then flee once more, later that year, on Maren’s 18th birthday, her father departs, leaving her with nothing but her birth certificate and cassette tape.

The cassette contains Maren’s past cannibalistic acts, which she doesn’t remember. Through flashbacks revealing more of her past, the audience learns of her birth mother, of whom she dosen’t know, and her desire to find her. With new intentions, she begins traveling across the Midwest to locate her birth mother. Along the way however, she meets a charming middle-aged man named Sully, who claims to be a cannibal as well. He infroms her of the nature behind the cannibalstic urges before she ultimatly abandons him; seeing his dissapointed face as she departs on a bus. Maren then is introduced to Lee (Timothée Chalamet), another eater or cannibal, much closer to her age. They quickly become friends, traveling together, and falling lin love with eachother.

Non-cannibals may be seen as prey to be tricked and slain. We even meet eater groupies, they self identify as cannibals. There are some very disturbing scenes, but the life of an eater is similar to that of a vampire. Such a lifestyle takes both a physical and emotional toll on the eaters but their choices are suicide, confinement to a psychiatric hospital, or living a peripatetic lifestyle, moving from place to place as they seek their next meal. 

In ways, this film reminds me of Mallick’s Badlands and Bigelow’s Near Dark as Maren and Lee drift through the American heartlands yet it is very much its own film. Surprisingly tender in parts, given its subject matter, but the end reveal will leave many stunned as there is a deeper meaning to the feature’s title. It fully deserves its 130-minute running time, I would not recomend for the squeamish or faint of heart. Overall, I rate this movie, 9.5/10.