November 26, 2022 – Killing and eating people is O.K. in movies, I guess, but I'll bet that eating dogs is not O.K., at least for now. Is this what we've come to? What ridiculous decadence.

This is a lot like a zombie movie. Zombies are flesh-eaters, but they are also mindless primitives. In this movie, the human flesh eaters are fully sentient. That's the difference. Many of us are flesh eaters, eaters of cattle, chickens, turkeys and many other animals. Some of us even kill the same animals we eat. There are those who feel that it is wrong to eat any kind of flesh at all. Perhaps this movie is a parable about the ethics of non-vegetarians.

Like vampires who kill humans to drink their blood, this movie is about people similarly compelled to kill people in order to survive. Maren Yearly (played by Taylor Russell of “Waves”) sneaks out of her house to attend a slumber party, which ends up being a really horrible slumber party.

Running back home with blood on her face and clothes, Maren is quickly hustled out of town by her father (played by André Holland of “Moonlight”) who knows his daughter's true nature. She eats people, and as a result, he and his daughter have been on the run for years, changing their names and moving from one town to another.

When she turns 18, Maren's father abandons her, leaving her only with some money, her birth certificate, and a tape recording in which he tells Maren everything about her and her mother that he knows. Maren starts following the clues left by her father in order to find her mother. Maren hops her mother has answers to her many questions about her true nature.

Along the way, she discovers that she is not the only one of her kind. A strange man, Sully (Mark Rylance of “Bridge of Spies”) seeks her out at a bus stop. He tells her that she is an “eater” and so is he. He is able to smell other eaters, and he is also able to smell people who are about to die. He leads Maren to a nearby house where a woman lay dying. After she dies, Sully and Maren both feast on her body.

Maren doesn't like creepy old Sully. She gets on a bus and leaves him behind. At another stop, she smells another eater, a much younger man, Lee (Timothée Chalamet of “Call Me by Your Name”) who agrees to help Maren travel hundreds of miles to Minnesota to find her mother. When Maren finally does find her mother, in an insane asylum, it is about the worst mother-daughter reunion imaginable.

While Lee seems fine killing and eating people, Maren is conflicted. After seeing what has become of her mother, Maren is overwhelmed by the fact there are no good options for moving ahead with her life. She needs to be alone to come to grips with her new reality. To make things worse, Sully has been following her. Sully wants to be with Maren and he reacts very badly to rejection.

The acting is excellent in this film, particularly the performances of Mark Rylance and Michael Stuhlbarg (“The Shape of Water”) who play some of the creepiest characters you are ever likely to see on screen. They make vampires look positively normal.

Despite the gallons of blood and slimy body parts, and the creepy characters, this is an almost compelling love story. After watching this movie, I felt hungry. This movie rates a B.

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