A quiet evening of teen girl cattiness, snacks, and nail polish, quickly dissolves into madness when the soft-spoken baby-faced Maren takes a literal bite out of her newfound friend’s finger and flees from the home with her face caked in blood, her white pajamas covered in red spots. Thus begins the core narrative of Bones and All.

Much mystery is woven throughout the film, and we won’t spoil much here. However, we soon learn that Maren craves human flesh. For most of her life, especially after her mother abandoned them as a baby, she and her father have drifted across the country, hiding from the trails of bones and blood that Maren left behind. This time, Maren’s father has had enough. Leaving her with a wad of cash, her birth certificate, and the cassette tape chronicling her life from her first bite as a child, she embarks West, determined to find the mother who left her behind.

Frightened but desperate to get the answers she seeks, Maren crosses paths with an older gentleman named Sully (Mark Rylance), or more accurately, he sniffs her out. Though their time together is brief, he teaches her a thing or two about what it means to be an eater — specifically, that fellow eaters can smell each other.

Bones and All

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