Thoughts on Bones and All

    On Criterion on Saturday, I watched Bones and All, a 2022 romantic horror film directed by Luca Guadagnino and written by David Kajganich, adapted from the novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis. The film stars Taylor Russell as a teen girl named Maren in 1988 Virginia, who is prone to cannibalism from since she was a child. When she nearly eats a girl’s finger off at a sleepover, she and her father (André Holland) quickly move, then she wakes up to find that he’s abandoned her, leaving behind an audiotape about how he’s always known what she is, and tried to protect her, but now she’s on her own.

    So she becomes a drifter in Middle America, meeting Sully (Mark Rylance), a fellow cannibal, or “eater,” who essentially sniffed her out as one of his own, and brings her to eat a dying old woman in a house, establishing rules about cannibalism. Maren goes along with it, but is horrified by her own behavior, and continues on, and meets Lee (Timothée Chalamet), a fellow young drifter and eater, and they travel together, building a romance, and Maren struggles with trying to have a moral line with her condition, while Lee is more prone to killing to survive.

    It’s an interesting movie that feels like an allegory for drug addiction, as the characters have their cycles of eating someone and feeling self hatred afterwards, seeking out each other as a family to not feel alone, and trying to have a moral code that they find hard to stick by as their hunger grows more.

    Taylor Russell is really great in this, in playing the vulnerability of Maren, and Chalamet is really good at playing a seemingly romanticized version of the rebel boyfriend who has a violent past, but it’s fine as long as the girlfriend isn’t hurt, which is a fantasy. Both have this deep chemistry together in their roles, and I enjoyed watching them.

    There are brief cameos from Jessica Harper, David Gordon Green, and Chloë Sevigny, and Mark Rylance shines as playing a creepy “mentor” who is very lonely, but deeply damaged from his condition.

    I really liked this movie a lot, and liked it as a road movie with a Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross film score, and how it both felt romantic and gory at the same time.