Bones and All [Blu-ray]
Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All is a story rooted in trauma, romance and the bonds of… cannibals. After being locked in her room at bedtime, our main character Maren (Taylor Russell) unscrews her window and hops out to go visit a new friend who is having a sleepover - but things quickly go from 0-100 as something bad happens, and she needs to run. Seemingly, this isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened with Maren, so she and her dad take off in the dead of night to flee the imminent arrival of police and find a new home, before she finds herself alone; now 18 and left to fend for herself as the burden of her ‘condition’ is too much for her father to bear.
You find yourself struggling to feel sorry for Maren to begin with - naturally, it’s pretty hard to relate to cannibals - but as she listens to a cassette left by her father explaining how this has been something she has battled since she was a small child, and that her mother went through this too, you realise that there’s more to her character than just a thirst for blood. Soon after, she meets an older man, Sully (played by Mark Rylance) who is just like her, and teaches her more of what she is: an Eater.
There’s complexities to these characters in a way that makes them not simply just cannibals, but some kind of human-vampire offshoot - but it does feel like it toes the line where it doesn’t just want to be ‘a vampire film’ for fear of the typical Twilight connotations, instead sticking to the cannibal side despite it being some sort of a genetic thing, rather than a messed up choice. It’s been a long time (aside from the earlier incident) since Maren last ‘fed’, and Sully explains to her that this will make things harder for her - make her more likely to do things she regrets - as her nature is hard to control. Sally’s aura lingers somewhere between comforting and unsettling, perfectly encapsulating the confusion that Maren must feel just by being in his presence, so she quickly moves on in her journey, alone once again.
A cross-country trip to try and find her mum, whose name and place of birth are the only pieces of information she knows, leads Maren to Lee, played by Timothée Chalamet, and they quickly bond over their strange similarities - despite the somewhat opposing ends of the spectrum they both lie. Maren struggles with what she is, finding it much harder to disassociate from the whole ‘eating humans’ side, whereas Lee seems to revel in it, almost enjoying the hunt of people who he sees as assholes.
An interesting, chance encounter with another Eater, Jake (and his wannabe Eater ‘groupie’) has him asking the pair if they’ve got their ‘full bones’ yet, explaining that this is - as the title describes - eating everything, bones and all and how this is a big thing for an Eater. Horrified by the discussion, again highlighting the struggles that she has with the morality of the situation, Maren heads back to the truck - and Jake (Michael Stuhlbarg) quickly susses out the couple’s dynamic, telling Lee that he looks like every junkie he has ever known, trying to keep his addiction under control but all it takes is one moment and he would lose it like an unravelling thread.
Finding out more about where she came from, and the struggles her own mother had, leaves Maren with a lot of mixed feelings - and this too is something that Lee and her have in common, as he has some conflicting history with his father. This all deepens the idea of this being a condition, a lifelong struggle, rather than something that is simply done by choice - it is all survival - making their journey through life to be a much more difficult tale, especially when other discoveries and events get in the way.
Overall, Bones and All was a surprisingly enjoyable movie filled with amazing performances. It has a lot of fantastic cinematography that really enhances the juxtaposition of not only the characters themselves, but in one particular shot showcases the normality of the world around them and the insanity within the walls of their home - which worked really effectively. Combined with a spell-binding, ominous soundtrack composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, that weaves seamlessly between lighter, romantic tracks to darker tones that accompany the bloodier scenes, Bones and All ended up being a truly mesmerising movie that stays on your mind long after the credits roll.
In the end, we decided to give Bones and All the Collecting Asylum rating of 9/10.
Are you interested in Bones and All? What do you think of it?
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- V x
Thank you to Warner Bros. for the Bones and All Blu-ray review disc!
