“Bones and All” (2022) is a film adaptation of a Camille DeAngelis’ novel with the same title, which I may read. Set in the 1980s, teen Maren (Taylor Russell) strains against her father’s strict rules and socializes despite them. One problem: he instituted those rules to stop her from hurting people. She is an “eater,” someone who is compelled to eat human flesh. Maren decides to trace her roots and find others like her with mixed results.
I love Tik Tok because when I saw Timothee Chamalet on the posters for “Bones and All,” I was not interested, but then Tik Tok creators said, “Hey, yo, cannibal movie.” Got it! Cannibals are a nice midpoint between vampires and zombies. It is realistic because they exist. Unlike zombies, they are conscious people. Unlike vampires, they do not possess powers that protect them from society’s ire. These eaters are not run of the mill people, but they are not supernatural, more like a species similar to human beings. These cannibals are soiled itinerant exiles due to their wandering and eating habits. I kept thinking that they felt like the true inspiration for The True Knot in “Doctor Sleep” (2019) even though this film and its novel came afterwards. Luca Guadagnino does not pull punches in term of the gore, but he also does not glamorize the violence. While unflinching in depicting consumption of people, Guadagnino humanizes the victims by using sequences of still shots of their belongings to reflect their lives. People are more than the moment that we cross their path, and the film never lets us forget it.
After Guadagnino knocked “Suspiria” (2018) out of the park, one of my all-time favorite films, I was not going to miss seeing his second stab at horror in theaters, but had to wait until its second week to catch it. I was surprised that it was not in any smaller chain films, just big chains. It was a fairly packed theater for a pandemic. It features some terrific performances, is a seamless period piece and the essence of the film works, but the overall story did not work for me because it was not bleak enough.
“Bones and All” is a coming of age, cannibal, love story, and even among ordinary people, love is a vulnerable thing. These cannibals want to belong and be part of a community, but they are inherently a danger to each other. Fears and needs are at war with the other. If you pair up with someone, will they hurt you even if they do not want to? This predicament is central to all relationships, and cannibalism works as a metaphor for this human experience by exploring that tension.
Russell is a talented actor, and I have never seen her not give a riveting performance. Russell does more for Maren than is depicted in the story. I was fine with Maren being a stranger to herself in the beginning of the film, but less so when the movie wants to continue to frame Maren as an innocent. I am uncertain if the fault lies with DeAngelis and/or Guadagnino, but there is a scene near the end of the film where Maren says something like, “It is not my way,” but we never see what her way is. At that point, she has met with other eaters, struck out on her own, but we still do not have a sense of how she survived. She sees herself as having three options of existence: suicide, a life in isolation or living. She chooses the latter, but I have no idea who she has become outside her relationships.
“Bones and All” depicts Maren initiating feeding once. During a moment of homoerotic intimate camaraderie in a bustling room with her best friend, her friendship transforms into predation so whenever someone was close to Maren, including Lee (Chamalet), a fellow eater whom she spends some time with, I kept wondering if she would turn on him just as he did with his marks. Is it a spoiler to say what does not happen? I was disappointed that there was never a moment where either Maren and/or Lee lost control and tried to eat the other. Instead their relationship’s foundation is finding delight at recognizing yourself in another. They are just two crazy kids trying to make their way through a world that does not understand them and find comfort in each other. It is sweet and beautiful in its simplicity, but the film pulls punches on their ethical disagreement. Maren keeps reminding Lee of his shortcomings as an eater to outsource/project her self-disgust, and it feels like cheating when they set her misgivings aside. If she accepts herself and embraces her life as an eater, how does she reconcile her ethical dilemmas or does she just dump them? Who the fuck cares-they are together?!? The film neglects Maren’s core identity crisis: her refusal to acknowledge her wrongdoing and blame others for her flaws. She runs away from them, but she cannot run away from herself.
Instead of truly dealing with this identity dilemma, “Bones and All” gives us Sully (Mark Rylance), the first eater, but far from the last, whom Maren encounters on the road. Rylance is an expert at playing Sully in two ways simultaneously-an unsettling man whom most would keep a wide berth of and also a vulnerable, lost, perhaps slow person who is not all there and needs the benefit of socialization classes. Sully does whatever it takes to move the story forward-he is a teacher and a threat, but his last appearance made my eyes roll. The denouement felt pat and like a cop out to avoid the central problem of Maren’s identity. It felt gimmicky, was abrupt and unsatisfying. I would have preferred that no character served as an external catalyst for identity and relationship crises. I am sick of Maren’s agency as an eater getting sidestepped.
“Bones and All” features some memorable cameos. Michael Stuhlbarg (huge crush) plays against type with director David Gordon Green as some extras straight out of “Deliverance” (1972). If someone decides to adapt this novel again, I would love if it was an American black director, preferably a woman, because there is definitely a racial tinge to this story. Maren presents as black in white (dangerous) spaces, and except for one scene, is the only black woman in the room. Even though others regard her as a monster or someone to be consumed, we do not know if they will attribute it to her skin color or her actions, but to the normal black characters, she is sympathetic but also a potential threat. She is a biracial character who presents as black, and her flaws can be traced to one person. I do not want to ruin the movie, but there is a huge history of mothers who embrace love regardless of race, but are unprepared for the challenges of mothering someone who will have different experiences and is unable to rise to that challenge. Then the father may not be able to help because of the gender divide and unresolved issues of race, which is further expanded by her otherness as a cannibal. Guadagnino does not have this experience, and I would not expect him to depict it. Another director may have played more with the historical legacy of white people as cannibals from picnics, lynchings, consumption of mummies to Jeffrey Dahmer, especially considering one murder scene, and the issues of race.
