Parents' Guide to Bones and All

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.