Unfortunately and maybe fortunately for me, I went into Bones and All without knowing anything about the film. All I knew was Timothee Chalamet and Taylor Russel (Lost in Space) were in it.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) and based on the novel by Camille DeAngelis, Bones and All start off very, very tame in the 1980s with a pretty girl playing the piano. It gets steamy for a second at a sleepover and then chaos descends. By this scene where Maren Yearly (Taylor Russel) bites off her friend's finger, you can’t help but be intrigued and invested in this film. Maren and her father have to leave the town so they don’t get tracked by the police and it’s clear this is something they’ve done tens of times. At their new place, Maren wakes up to find her father gone, a tape and her birth certificate left as the only explanation.

The tape recording by Frank Yearly(André Holland) is the only backstory we get about Maren - what she is, how it began etc and his narrations are the best part of Bones and All as they are raw, insightful and filled with emotions. But as Maren finds Lee (Timothee Chalamet) we hear her father’s narrations less often until they descend into an almost disinterested/nonchalant ending. It was almost like as the Lee/Maren love story took over, they simply had no more need for that emotional cocktail. Just like the initial mission of Lee/Maren’s journey which was to find Maren’s birth mother.


Taylor Russell and Mark Rylance as Maren and Sully in Bones and All (2022)


What's intriguing about Marlene and her condition(?) as an “eater" is that we slowly catch on to the fact that there’s an eating etiquette that Maren is unaware of because she’s never been in that community or met another eater. Lee would rather not talk after having a meal and “wiping down" in front of another eater as well as showing trophies is apparently a very intimate act for Sully (Mark Rylance).

There’s a lot for Maren to learn but the issue with Bones and All is that we don’t know if she ever does. In the first half of the film, there’s an internal battle between her desire/urge to eat and her moral dilemma and this leads her to make statements like “we should feel something because we murder people” and eventually leave Lee. But when she returns to Lee, we never know if she has learned to love herself or if she has simply decided to mentally sever that part of herself and try to live like a regular human. Her path to self-discovery is almost opposite to Lee's as he’s able to come to terms with his traumatic origin story.

Because there seems to be little resolution to Maren's story (the reason why we're all sitting in front of our screens to begin with) besides her saying emphatically that she absolutely will not be like her mother — who tried to kill her daughter and supposedly ate her own arms which is a pretty low bar if you ask me - the entire story seems pointless and to be for no other reason than to show two beautiful people have cutesy moments, feast on other people and then feast on a loved one… out of love? Everything but Lee and Maren's budding love story is treated as fodder. Does Marlene ever recover her memories? Does she make peace with it? Why did Maren react so strongly to the idea of “full bones”? What was the point of that encounter in the middle of nowhere? Could Lee have been saved and that ending was solely for some artsy jarring moment?

Bones and All has a couple of good things going on for it - the natural performances delivered by Russell and Rylance, the occasional shots of a large blue sky, an empty green field or even stills that serve as a window into the life of Marlene and Lee's victims. Still, it has elements that make it a tough swallow. The dialogue between Lee and Maren during heated scenes can be quite clunky — not even Chalamet could give life to the “how dare you make this harder” line. While Chalamet described Bones and All as a “love story”, perhaps it should have stuck to that - a love story. Rather than trying to depict moral dilemma, self-discovery and suspense and only delivering on the love bit.

Fans of this movie have described it as absurdism or a “metaphor” for all kinds of things - loneliness, addiction etc but what kind of metaphor is if as his last wish, a dying man asks his partner, a struggling addict, to do a lot more drugs than she’s ever done? A bad one.