Bones and All

There’s before bones and all, and then there’s after.

In the midst of the Timothéenomenon due to his critically acclaimed performance in A Complete Unknown, I felt inspired to revisit one of his most underrated movies, Bones and All. I remember being blown away after the film. I couldn’t think of anything else. When I went home, my sister and I sat at the dinner table watching interviews of the cast on our laptops because we were so emotionally attached to what we just saw.

To be transparent, I had no idea what the plot of Bones and All was going into it. I hadn’t heard of the book, and the only trailer I had seen was very vague, making it seem like some kind of psychological thriller about murderers. Finding out it was actually a cannibalistic love story was shocking. If you haven’t seen the film, it might not sound very appealing or romantic, but if you choose to watch it, you might change your mind.

Cannibalism As A Metaphor

Bones and All. 2022. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.

In real life, cannibalism is associated with serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer or periods in history where famine was so bad that people resorted to eating each other. In these cases, we’re looking at people with incomprehensible psychological disorders or people who have reached the utmost levels of desperation. Bones and All deals with characters who were born with an uncontrollable need to feed on other humans in order to survive, like the way a vampire needs to drink people’s blood. This is purely fiction and acts as a metaphor for being cast out of society. When we meet Maren, she’s invited to a sleepover where she bites her friend's finger off before fleeing town with her father before the cops can catch them.

On her 18th birthday, her father abandons her, leaving her only with a cassette tape and player to narrate her life, like the first time she fed on someone, a babysitter when she was three years old. Any time a parent abandons their child, it’s wrong; even if Maren is 18 when he leaves, it doesn’t make it any less hard for her to deal with. She grew up without a mother, moved around a lot because of her condition, and her father was the only constant in her life. However, I also have compassion for her father, who did all he could to help his daughter and feels like there’s nothing else he could do. It’s like having a murderer or serial killer as a child. Do you stick around and keep protecting them as they kill people, or at some point, do you have to get away no matter how hard it is to abandon your own child?

“The world of love wants no monsters in it,”-Janelle, Bones and All.

Unlike most killers in the real world, Maren doesn’t mean to cause anyone harm; that’s why it’s so hard for her to be left alone. She wants to be normal, and she wants to form connections, but she can’t help herself. Take away the murder aspect and view this from the perspective of anyone who is cast out and viewed as a danger to society; it’s a deeply sad and lonely life to live. That’s why this film touched me so much. Everyone can relate to feeling like an outsider at some point in their life, but in Maren’s case, she actually is a danger to society. It’s heartbreaking to watch someone who so desperately wants to be normal and wants to find people who accept her not be able to find that because of a condition she was born with and can’t control.

There’s also a deep shame that Maren carries, along with the other cannibals we meet later in the film. Sully tells the story of how he ate his own grandfather, and Lee confesses the story of eating his father. While Sully says his mother stuck by his side, creating a story that an animal got in and attacked his grandfather, he also admits that when he ran away from home, no one came to look for him. None of these characters want to be this way, but there is no other way for them.

Finding Connection

Bones and All. 2022. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.

There is nothing the characters in this film crave more than connection. That’s why they seek each other out. When Sully smelled Maren, he approached her. When Maren smelled Lee, she approached him. They search for others like themselves because they’re the only ones who won’t fear them. They’re searching for a community.

Sully

Maren meets Sully first. According to Sully, eaters should never feed on other eaters. Even though Sully is a stranger, Maren trusts him. She follows him to the home of a dying, elderly woman, and they feed on her together. The scene is deeply disturbing, but it’s the first time Maren has ever fed with another person. It’s the first time in her life she isn’t completely alone with her condition. It’s a bonding experience, as insane as that might sound. Before Sully, Maren didn’t know there was anyone else like her, so even though their interactions are unsettling and something feels deeply off about Sully–he even has a braid of all his victims’ hair like a serial killer would keep–Maren stays longer than the average person would.

Even though Sully seems dangerous, and Maren eventually flees his home without his knowledge, I still feel sorry for him. He wanted Maren to stay so badly because, just like her, he didn’t want to be alone. He wants a companion, someone who understands him, someone to feed with. Maren is clearly not the right person, but he’ll take anyone to escape the deep loneliness that comes from being an eater.

Janelle

When Maren’s father abandons her, she realizes she has no one to stay for, so she sets out on a journey to find her mother, Janelle. She’s lived with an abandonment wound from her mother for her entire life, and while she’s seeking connection as an eater, she’s also seeking the connection she lost when her mother left. Maren seems to think reuniting with her mother will fill the void, but she’s let down when she finds her mother and learns her mother is just like her but worse. Janelle is in a psychiatric hospital, where she has chewed off her own arms and tries to attack Maren when she goes to see her.

Maren narrowly escapes being murdered, but she’s faced with the truth that her mother can not save her. Truthfully, nobody can. She has to accept who she is, even if it means doing awful things to people in order to survive. Going to find her mother did not give her back the years she spent growing up without her. It didn’t take away her loneliness, and it didn’t give her a place to belong. While it may have explained how she ended up the way she is, that knowledge didn’t help Maren in any way but actually further traumatized her and made her feel even lonelier.

Maren & Lee

Here’s where we dive into an unlikely, beautiful, and tragic love story. Maren finds the connection she’s been craving in Lee–the bond she initially was introduced to when she met Sully, and what she desperately sought from her mother. Where she felt unsettled in Sully’s presence, enough to escape his house, she feels safe with Lee. Lee is a stranger, too, but when we see him eat a man he meets in a corner store, drawing Maren’s attention, we don’t see him as creepy as we see Sully. We see him as another helpless soul like Maren.

“I think you got used to being locked up and invisible and alone, and now you’re out in the world, and you’re seeing yourself for the first time, and that’s freaking you out,”-Lee, Bones and All.

Lee could be just as wary of Maren as we assume she should be of hanging out with a strange guy she just met, but he seems to trust her, too. When she asks him why he offered to take her with him, he simply says, “You seem nice.” However, I think it was more than that. Lee is deeply lonely, too, and finding someone around his age who also feeds on people made him feel like maybe he didn’t have to be alone forever either. There’s a lyric from The 1975’s single “Me And You Together Song” where Matty Healy sings, “I fell in love with her in stages.” That’s what it looked like watching Maren and Lee in Bones and All.

Because I didn’t know anything about the plot, I didn’t realize it was a love story. But, there was the close-up shot of Lee’s face from Maren’s perspective when they were sleeping in the truck bed. Next, when Lee goes to give his sister driving lessons, Maren stays back at his aunt's abandoned house, smiling as she looks through his childhood photos. Then, they’re laughing together at the dining room table. It was when they go to the slaughterhouse, before the scene when they kiss, that I realized where this story was going because it unfolded so naturally, mostly thanks to Luca Guadagnino’s brilliant direction.

Also, to Guadagnino’s credit, are the beautiful visuals from start to finish. The film plays with lighting a lot, and many of the scenes I admire most were shot in the afternoon or at sunset when the soft lighting makes it feel like watching a beautiful romance. Shots of Maren and Lee walking around a local fair at sunset were like watching Jack and Rose kiss at sunset in Titanic. Much like that film, tragedy would inevitably strike, putting an end to the fantasy.

I also loved the scenes of them driving around in Lee’s car. There are a lot of these in the film, not only because they’re on a road trip together to find Maren’s mother but because driving is a way for them to be away from society. There’s the cliché saying that it’s not about where you are, it’s about who you’re with, but this rings even more true for Lee and Maren. The car scenes are intimate because they don’t have to hide anything when it’s just the two of them. While all the fun may appear to be out in the world where other people are, they actually prefer it just to be the two of them because being around other people could be dangerous.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned above, tragedy has to strike, like when Titanic hit the iceberg. Maren and Lee feed on a carnival worker, but when Maren finds out he had a family–a wife and baby at home–she is riddled with a guilt that Lee doesn’t seem to understand. From his perspective, no matter how awful it is, this is how they have to live, and there’s nothing they can do about it. She, on the other hand, finds it hard to live with herself knowing what she has done, and she can’t understand why Lee doesn’t feel as awful as she does. Also, after reuniting with her mother and learning she’s not who she expected her to be, Maren makes a declaration that she will not be like her mother–a declaration heard much too often that rarely turns out to be true.

“You look like the kind that’s convinced himself he’s got this under his thumb, but you pull on one little thread and…swish swish swish…but maybe love will set you free, man,”-Jake, Bones and All.

The hard truth comes out in this scene: even though Maren has found a connection with Lee, she can’t escape who she is. This is an internal conflict, and even though Lee is like her, he can’t save her from herself or her past. The two do end up reuniting, and that’s when we learn about the deep shame Lee carries for eating his father. From his story, we know his dad was abusive–and tried to attack him like Janelle tried to attack Maren–but he still holds what he did against himself. It’s also the first time he admits to enjoying feeding on someone, though we assume this was likely because his father wasn’t a good person to begin with.

Bones and All. 2022. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.

Up until now, Lee has been the strong one throughout the film. Maren even teases him earlier in the film, telling him, “You seemed like such a hard case yesterday.” He jokes, “When you weigh 140 pounds wet, you gotta have a big attitude instead.” Lee’s personality is a coping mechanism. A way to keep him safe so he doesn’t have to face all his inner demons. When he confesses what he did to his father to Maren, we learn he carries the same guilt about his father that she feels after eating the carnival worker. Maybe that’s why Lee didn’t understand her feelings; he still hadn’t processed his own. However, the confession brings them closer together, and through tears, Maren tells Lee she doesn’t believe he’s a bad person. It is the first time anyone has made him feel validated.

I naively thought Maren and Lee were in the clear after this. We get a montage of what appears to be their future together. Everything is going smoothly until Sully reappears, tries to attack Maren, and then stabs Lee in the chest when he steps in to save his girlfriend. While there was a bump in the road for Maren and Lee, when they found their way back to eachother, it felt like it would actually work out this time. That’s what makes the ending so heart-wrenching. I believed while watching the film for the first time that their connection and love for each other was strong enough to outweigh their condition. At the end, they’ve integrated themselves into society, and it seems like they really will be able to experience normalcy for the first time. But this is all just fantasy.

Lee and Maren kill Sully, but Lee is bleeding out from his own wound. Lee encourages Maren not to take him to the hospital but instead to eat him. “I want you to eat me….bones and all,” a reference to something a man named Jake told them earlier in the film about the exhilaration of eating someone bones and all versus just eating their flesh and blood. Jake was also the one to mock Lee for thinking he and Maren could live happily ever after despite their need to feed on other humans. Maren initially refuses to eat Lee but soon does as he wishes. I was livid the first time I saw the film because I had been tricked into believing they made it out of the woods.

But it was foolish to think they could ever escape the need to feed off other beings; we had already learned that when they fought over the carnival worker. Lee knows this, and that’s why he sacrifices his life and gives himself to Maren. Throughout the film, they grow closer and closer to each other, but this is the closest they’ve been because, from this point on, Lee will forever be a part of Maren.

“It’s the easiest thing, Maren, love. Just love me and eat,”-Lee, Bones and All.

I found a quote while I was working on this newsletter: “Love me down to my bones, then go deeper,” I’m not sure who originally said it, but it felt relevant to Bones and All. They loved each other deeply in the way they accepted each other for all the things they did in their past. Maren was the first one Lee could confess to about his father, and she never judged him for it. He was the same solace for her. They truly loved each other down to their bones. To eat him and for him to give up his body to Maren was to go deeper.

The movie ends with visuals of Maren and Lee alone in the same field where they were when Lee told Maren what he did to his dad. I don’t know if this is a flashback, a memory, or an alternate reality where Sully never got to them, and they did get to live the happy life they planned on living. All I know is it’s a beautiful sequence showcasing the deep love they had for each other in the most unique and unforeseen circumstances.