Bones and All movie storyline. A story of first love between Maren, a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee, an intense and disenfranchised drifter, as they meet and join together for a thousand-mile odyssey which takes them through the back roads, hidden passages and trap doors of Ronald Reagan’s America. But despite their best efforts, all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and to a final stand that will determine whether their love can survive their otherness.
Bones and All is a 2022 coming-of-age romantic cannibal road horror film directed by Luca Guadagnino from a screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis. The film features an ensemble cast that includes Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland, Chloë Sevigny, David Gordon Green, and Jessica Harper.
Bones and All had its world premiere at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on September 2, 2022, where it won the Silver Lion for best direction, and was released in the United States on November 18, 2022, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (through United Artists Releasing) and elsewhere by Warner Bros. Pictures, with the exception of Italy, where it was distributed by Vision Distribution.
Film Review for Bones and All
ake, eat, this is my body,” said Jesus at the last supper, a line I remembered while reading Piers Paul Read’s book about the survivors of the 1972 Andes plane crash, and remembered again watching Luca Guadagnino’s new film, adapted by screenwriter David Kajganich from the YA bestseller by Camille DeAngelis – although here there isn’t quite the same transformative miracle. Bones And All is a macabre horror, an emo adventure in revulsion, a tale of young and forbidden love, and a parable for that terrible secret thought, scary but also euphoric, that enters into everyone’s head in their teen years: I am different.
We are at the tail-end of the Reaganite 80s, an era lacking the surveillance and DNA technology which, in the present day, might have taken a bite out of this movie’s plausibility. Taylor Russell plays Maren, a shy, smart kid who has just started at a new school, living on the edge of poverty with her careworn dad (André Holland). One of her new friends invites her to a sleepover, where the mood of humid, girlish intimacy excites Maren in ways her new friends could not have anticipated: she bites someone’s finger off and eats it.
Maren is in fact a cannibal, and her terrible addictive compulsion has kept her and her dad on the run for years. And when her dad abandons her on her 18th birthday, Maren heads off on a mission to find her mom, to find out who she is and why she does this. Along the way, she finds there are other secret cannibals, “eaters” or “feeders” (who use a phrase redolent of Tod Browning’s classic Freaks: “one of us”). Their ethos is never to eat one of their own and it is from them that Maren learns of the ultimate cannibal experience, to eat someone completely: bones and all.
Maren is to fall in love with a wiry, fragile, beautiful runaway called Lee, played by Timothée Chalamet in his delicate, cheekbones-and-all style. Unlike Bella and Edward in Twilight, there is no question of refraining from sex, but Maren is nonetheless horrified by what Lee is prepared to do to get his fix and horrified at what she finds out about her mother. She and Lee manage to make a life together in the straight world, yet there is a dark shadow in their carnivore romance: a creepy old “eater” called Sully, played by Mark Rylance, who inducts Maren into the way of the cannibal and has further gourmand designs.
Lee and Maren’s cannibalism has something bizarrely innocent about it – and Guadagnino’s achievement is to provoke us with this wild absurdity and yet sell it to us, to persuade us to believe they are outlaw victims of fate, like Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Terrence Malick’s Badlands.
The flesh-eating compulsion portrayed in Bones and All is very different from the cannibalism of Hannibal Lecter, which is far more cynical and worldly. Nor is it simply a YA metaphor for rebellion and marginalisation and dissenting identity politics, mischievously designed for a young audience who have probably embraced veganism. It is also about poverty and homelessness, the ruthlessness of survival and the secret shame of that special sort of hunger that stays with you even when you do survive. Bones And All is an extravagant and outrageous movie: scary, nasty and startling in its warped romantic idealism.
Bones and All (2022)
Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Starring: Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, André Holland, Chloë Sevigny, David Gordon Green, Jessica Harper, Jake Horowitz, Mark Rylance, Madeleine Hall, Ellie Parker
Screenplay by; David Kajganich, Camille DeAngelis
Production Design by: Elliott Hostetter
Cinematography by: Arseni Khachaturan
Film Editing by: Marco Costa
Costume Design by: Giulia Piersanti
Set Decoration by: Merissa Lombardo, Rebecca Steele
Art Direction by: Victoria Resendez
Music by: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross
Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (via United Artists Releasing; United States), Warner Bros. Pictures (United Kingdom)
Release Date: September 2, 2022 (Venice), November 18, 2022 (United States)
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