“Bones and All”, the novel, was originally published in 2015 by Camille DeAngelis and was set in the 80s. The book blends suspenseful horror and coming of age together in her interpretation of a society that lives with dormant and active cannibals.
The film, released in November 2022 stars Taylor Russel as Maren Yearly and Timothee Chalamet as her love interest, Lee. Directed by Luca Guadagnino whose name has become synonymous with Chalamet, and movies based on novels set in the 80s.
The gory romance begins in Virginia when Maren is encouraged to sneak out to a slumber party by a girl from school. At the sleepover, a shot focuses on her and a classmate lying beneath a glass coffee table for almost too long. Maren glances down at the finger of the girl who had just gotten a fresh coat of paint, and before the viewer gets a good look Maren puts the girl’s finger in her mouth and bites down. Maren runs home to her father, played by Andre Holland, who answers the door to a bloody daughter. “You didn’t?” he asks her, letting the viewer know that he’s well aware of her compulsion for human flesh.
Maren never knew her mother, and once her father gets her settled in Maryland, far away from the cries of the bloody, fingerless, girl he leaves her there. With only some cash, her birth certificate, and a tape. In the tape Leonard, her father, tells her everything he knows about who she is, or who he thinks she is. After hearing this Maren sets off on a journey to find her birth mother, with only the place she was born, Minnesota. She also sets out on a journey to find herself, and a humane way to satisfy her need to eat other humans.
She finds Lee close to the beginning of the movie, they quickly fall in love, and he agrees to accompany her to Minnesota to find her mother. Halfway through the meaning of the title is revealed by a man named Jake, he explains that an “eater” doesn’t know the true meaning of eating until they devour their prey “Bones and All”. One could guess how this movie will end.
Romance in movies or shows with source material can oftentimes feel rushed. Maybe it’s believed that the viewer wouldn’t want time wasted on the inevitable, but this thinking causes them to miss the mark. There also isn’t much time used to explain why. Maren was on a supposed mission to find her purpose, her meaning, and she encountered other eaters who already knew their “whys”, but even Lee’s was never explained. No one in the story feels important. A downside of having the viewers sympathize with cannibals coupled with a migrant storyline. Humans took the backseat for their appetite.
In the beginning, Maren comes off as a skittish person, running from any signs of danger, but as soon as she meets Lee she deems him a worthy companion on the search for her mother. The only characters they encounter more than once are Lee’s sister, Kayla, and an old eater named Sully who gives Maren the rule to “never eat an eater”. New York Times’ A.O. Scott explains it best when they said that the viewer becomes more transfixed on “what might happen to Maren and Lee than of what they might do to anyone else.”
What saves this film is the attention to detail. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the film’s music composers, relied on simple acoustic guitar for most of the score of the film, which matched the midwestern scenic shots. There’s this looming feeling that something’s right around the corner, and this shows through the increasing intensity of the music. The characters are passionate, by design, and Chalamet and Russel’s acting does do the parts justice.
Maren and Lee refer to themselves as eaters, and the film drew lines on a zoomed-in portrait of what an eater should look like, and by the end all of those lines connected for Maren. As the scope of the viewer broadened it was more understood what Maren should do to find herself, whether that can be done on a road trip to find her mother in Minnesota or by partaking in the act of “Bones and All”.
A rule-defying coming-of-age story for a girl who doesn’t know if her destiny allows for her to be empathetic and a tragic love story between two anti-heroes is enough to gain buzz, even making $14 million in theaters.
My rating of the film as someone who is not on the caliber of A.O. Scott is three bones out of five.