The 2022 movie Bones and All, written by David Kajganich and directed by Luca Guadagnino, uniquely and beautifully explores love, morals and cannibalism with leads Taylor Russell, Timothee Chalamet and Mark Rylance.
Bones and All is based on a book originally written by Camille DeAngelis. In this society live humans that are born with the uncontrollable need to eat others, and while these Eaters aren’t exactly rare, non-Eaters are completely unaware of their existence. While it sounds like a horror movie, DeAngelis paints such a complex picture of questioning one’s beliefs, finding where you fit in and determining what it means to love someone.
Russel’s character, 16-year-old Maren Yearly, is abandoned by her dad after he grows tired of covering up her cannibalism. Left with just her birth certificate, a cassette tape of her dad and a few 20-dollar bills, Maren sets off to find her mother. Along the way, she meets two other Eaters separately. First, she meets Rylance’s character, Sully. After eating an already dead elderly woman, Maren continues her journey, much to Sully’s dismay. She then meets another Eater her age, Lee, played by Timothee Chalamet, with whom she continues her journey and falls in love with along the way.
If there was a single word to describe this movie, it would be unique. From the plot to the cinematography, the movie combines classic techniques from a variety of genres. Even so, there is not anything average about the movie. It is a traditional coming-of-age love story, only tainted with gore, jumpscares and violence.
The cinematography ranges from peaceful wide shots to the perspective of someone being attacked. The shots make it feel more human, like it is happening to you or that it is a real person in the movie recording what is happening. The movie repeatedly utilizes the peacefulness and naivety of scenes or characters to make unexpected scenes more shocking.
The music throughout the movie is also connected to the two moods throughout. During parts of the movie that are calm or focused on the romance plot, calm and folky music is played. This is contrasted with the classic eerie, low music played during the horror plot.
Unsurprisingly, the actors give an outstanding performance in Bones and All. One reason why Chalamet and Russel work so well together on screen as Maren and Lee is their respective talent of making any character they play feel so real. This is showcased in the way they speak in the movie as they make their dialogue sound so natural. On the contrary, the reason Rylance did an amazing job at making Sully feel so creepy or off is how inhuman and unnatural his acting was.
The combined use of contrasting techniques for cinematography, music and acting allows for the movie to seamlessly blend two completely opposite plots of love and horror. The ending nicely ties the entire movie together, with the last scene being a mix of gore and intense romance.
Bones and All is full of metaphors for almost all aspects of life. It could be said that the movie is meant to represent a multitude of things, including addiction, accepting someone in their entirety, the impossibility of love and even closeted queerness. The movie’s deeper meanings could be easily lost to a casual viewer, but it is the deeper meanings that ultimately make the movie so great. Understanding that the story contains deeper meanings before viewing it fixes this problem, however.
For fans of tragic love stories like Guadagnino’s and Chalemet’s Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All is the ideal movie. While Bones and All is not perfect, it is pretty close. In just two hours, the movie creatively creates a coming-of-age love story that has the audience relating to cannibals.
