Film / Bones and All (2022)

aka: Bones And All

"Maybe love will set you free."

Maren: You protected the people that you love.
Lee: You don't think I'm a bad person?
Maren: All I think is that I love you.

Bones and All is a 2022 horror-romance film directed by Luca Guadagnino, based on the novel of the same name by Camille De Angelis. It stars Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, Andre Holland, Chloë Sevigny, and Jessica Harper.

Maren (Russell) is an 18-year-old girl who suffers from an overwhelming hunger for human flesh that has isolated her from society. Striking out on her own, she discovers more people like her and must come to terms with her place in the world.

The film premiered at the 79th Venice Film Festival and it earned the Silver Lion for Best Direction for Luca Guadagnino and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Taylor Russell.

This film provides examples of:

• 20 Minutes into the Past: The film was made in The New '20s, but is set in The '80s.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Lee is blond in the book, but has red hair in the film.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: In the book, Sully has half of his ear missing, and he also is missing part of his index finger. In the film, this was omitted.
• Adaptational Heroism: Played with. In the book, Maren ends up eating Lee at the end when they have sex per her own urges. In the film, he asks her to eat him after he is fatally wounded.
• Adaptational Sexuality: In the film, Lee has a sexual encounter with a man before eating him. There's no indication in the book he's anything but straight.
• Adaptational Villainy: In the film, Maren's institutionalized mother tries to kill her. (In her eyes she's "saving" Maren.) In the book, this never happens with Maren's institutionalized father.
• Age Lift: In the book, Maren is sixteen, whereas she is eighteen in the film. The fact that she is a legal adult comes up several times in the film.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • It's left ambiguous as to whether eaters can actually eat a human "bones and all." Jake asserts that it's true, but Maren doesn't see how that's possible. We never see anyone do it.
  • It's not exactly clear whether Jake has any ill intent toward Maren and Lee. He acts in a friendly although fairly creepy manner and goes to sleep nearby the pair without incident. When Lee and Maren try to flee in the middle of the night, he awakens and chases after them angrily, though it's ambiguous as to whether he's angry because he's offended or because they're slipping out of his clutches.
• Anti-Hero: Our protagonists are technically two Serial Killers, though they're treated sympathetically, and their hunger is not their fault.
• Asshole Victim: Both of the people we see Lee kill are assholes, which keeps him sympathetic. In the case of the carnie, Maren forces Lee to understand that even if the guy was a dick, he was still a person with loved ones.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Maren and Lee are both attractive, and they're our sympathetic antiheroes. Along the way, they meet two other eaters, who are both unpleasant-looking people and prove to be threatening to some degree or another.
• Bittersweet Ending: The end of the plot has Sully killing Lee and even his sister Kayla, leaving Maren alone. However, the final shot is Maren and Lee embracing at a picnic, their love eternal.
• Bloodier and Gorier: In the book, all of the cannibalism and violence is offscreen, whereas the film shows everything in gory detail.
• Casting Gag: Chloë Sevigny plays another institutionalized amputee.
• Chekhov's Gun: When Maren first meets Sully, she notes with some apprehension the knife he wears in a sheath on his belt, and he uses it to cut up some hens. In the end, he uses it to attack Maren and Lee.
• Chekhov's Skill: The film makes a point to show that Maren's father has taught her how to drive despite her sheltered existence. She's later shown driving after setting off on her own.
• Country Matters: When Maren rejects Sully's offer to join him, he angrily responds with a vulgar tirade that includes a C-bomb, instantly showing that she made the right decision.
• Creepy Souvenir: Sully takes hair from the people he eats and makes a giant braid out of that is several yards long. He shows it off to Maren with prides and notes how strong it is. The dozens of pins he displays on his suit jacket are likely also pilfered from his victims.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Maren's father, despite all his best efforts, simply can no longer afford either to cover for Maren's crimes or to keep skipping town every time her urges get the better of her. So he leaves while she's at school, though he leaves behind enough money to support her for a while and her original birth certificate, allowing her to start looking for her mother.
• Death by Adaptation: Kayla, Lee's sister, is killed in the film but not the book.
• Dirty Old Man: Sully is strangely infatuated with Maren, who is decades younger than him. Even though he's friendly and helpful to her, she gets a creepy vibe off of him. When she declines his offer to join him, he throws misogynistic slurs at her like a spurned suitor. In the end, he more or less confirms his erotic interest in her by rubbing his face on hers in an erotic manner at knifepoint.
• Doing In the Wizard: The most supernatural elements from the book are removed. In the book, an eater can wholly devour someone, "bones and all," in a manner of minutes. In the book, Jake claims that eaters are all eventually able to do this, but Maren expresses doubt as to whether that's possible, and we never see it happen.
• Doorstep Baby: Maren finds out that her mother was one of these.
• Evil Mentor: Maren receives some training and exposition about eating from Sully, who is obviously seeking to take her under his wing. Maren ultimately rejects him, and he proves to be quite a wicked man even for an eater.
• Fingore: Maren's first act of cannibalism is to bite off a friend's finger during a sleepover.
• Foreshadowing: Lee and Maren break into a slaughterhouse where he used to work to steal some money, and Maren asks Lee if he ever thought about the cows having families. Later, Lee kills a man who turns out to have a family.
• Gender Flip: In the book, Maren is abandoned by her mother and goes searching after her father. In the film, it's the opposite: She is abandoned by her father and goes searching after her mother.
• Gorn: The movie is very graphic and bloody in its depictions of cannibalism.
• Idiot Ball: Lee is established to be practiced in killing his victims by surprise. However, in the end, he chooses just about the dumbest way to ambush Sully possible: pulling a plastic bag over the knife-wielding Sully's head, virtually ensuring that Lee will get stabbed in the struggle.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Eaters are driven by an innate compulsion to eat human flesh.
• Kick the Dog: Sully is very creepy but expresses, if anything, more morality than the other eaters we meet. When Maren rejects his offer to join him, however, he instantly responds with a vulgar and misogynistic tirade, revealing that he is just as bad as he comes across after all.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Maren's white maternal grandmother in the film says she and her grandfather shunned their daughter, her mother, for marrying her father. It's not stated, but pretty obviously a result of his race, as he's black.
• Murder by Inaction: Sully says that he prefers to not kill the people he eats. Instead, he finds people who are dying and withholds his help so that they die. He prevents Maren from calling for help to save the woman in the house so that they can eat her once she dies.
• No Longer with Us: Maren goes in search of her Missing Mom, and finds her grandmother, who says that her mother is "no longer with us." Maren thinks that her mother is dead, until her grandmother clarifies that she's really in a mental institution.
• The Nose Knows: Eaters have a supernatural sense of smell, although apparently they sometimes have to be taught how to use it.
• Parental Abandonment: Maren is abandoned by her father at the start of the film, while her mother had left long ago.
• Patricide: Lee reveals that he ate his abusive father.
• Race Lift: Maren is described as having pale skin in the book and is Black in the film.
• Related Differently in the Adaptation: Sully is revealed to be Maren's grandfather in the book. This was omitted from the film.
• Road Trip Plot: The majority of the plot comprises of Maren traveling around America looking for her mother.
• Safety Worst: Maren's father initially comes across as an overprotective dad because he won't let her go out with friends and locks her in her bedroom at night, but then it's revealed that she's a compulsive cannibal who needs to be protected from herself.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Both Sully and Jake behave in a friendly but creepy manner that puts Maren on edge. She sneaks away from both of them without any preamble, and both take it poorly.
• Stalker with a Crush: Sully spends months following Maren around before making his move. When she rejects him, he freaks out.
• Sympathetic Murderer: The protagonists commit murder, but it's because they will be driven insane by the starvation if they don't periodically consume human meat.
• Tearful Smile: Lee gives one to Maren, trying to hide that he's crying while he reveals that he ate his abusive father.
• Third-Person Person: Sully often refers to himself in the third person. When he spitefully asserts to Maren, "You don't like Sully," she finally tires of it and asks why he speaks about himself like he's two different people. In response, he restates, "You don't like me," showing that he can use first-person pronouns. She calls him on it again in their final meeting to irritate him again.
• Title Drop: Said three times in the film.
  • The first two are spoken by Jake:
  Jake: When you eat the whole thing, bones and all. You ain't done that yet? It's a big fucking deal. It's like your first time. There's before bones and all, and then there's after.
  • And later, by Lee in the end of the film:
  Lee: I want you to do it, Maren. I'm done here. I want you to do it, Maren. Bones and all.
• Visual Metaphor: The film poster shows the two lead characters, who are in love, in a heart shape.
• Wall Slump: When Lee is fatally stabbed by Sully, he slides down the wall, leaving a trail of blood in it.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: At the end of the the film, it looks like Maren and Lee are going to earn their happy endings... until Sully comes in and holds Maren hostage. Lee successfully kills him, but bleeds out due to an injury sustained in the fight, and demands that Maren eat the rest of him.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Maren is disgusted when she meets a police officer who is fascinated by eaters and tries to emulate them, eating human meat by choice rather than an innate compulsion.