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Bones and All, 2022
Maren (Taylor Russell) is a young woman with an irrepressible desire to consume the flesh of other people. Shuffled from place to place by her father (Andre Holland), Maren wakes up one day to find that he has left her to navigate the world alone. With only some cash and her birth certificate on hand, Maren decides to make her way to Minnesota, where she hopes to find the mother she never knew. Along with way she finds that she’s not the only one of her kind. Meeting fellow “eater” Sully (Mark Rylance), Maren starts to learn the ropes. As she continues on her journey, she meets up with Lee (Timothee Chalamet), also afflicted with the insatiable hunger.
Trapped in largely unengaging space between straight-ahead horror and art-house allegory, a handful of promising scenes leave you wishing for what might have been.
To quote Folding Ideas host Dan Olsen, “Okay, so what . . . is this?”. There is a lot of great horror out there whose monsters and scenarios can easily be seen to double for all sorts of real-world terrors: addiction, infatuation, domestic violence, mental illness, etc. But while the construction of this film suggests a gesture at such an allegory, things just do not cohere in any kind of satisfying way.
There is some really good stuff scattered through the film. To begin with, I really liked Russell as the lead. She’s trying to navigate her own sense of survival and morality, and Russell does a good job of portraying someone who just keeps running up against versions of her life that she does not want. Chalamet is one of those actors who is very easily watchable. He’s got an understated charisma that’s well-suited to a character who largely doesn’t want to be noticed. Rylance walks a fine line between endearing and super-creepy as a man who keeps the hair of his victims in a long, braided rope that he carried in a satchel.
I also have to mention a scene in the film that, frankly, is an A+ as a short film within the larger movie around it. Maren and Lee end up around a campfire with two other Eaters, Jake (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Brad (David Gordon Green). In the flickering light, cracking cold beers, Jake tells the story of how he and Brad met. I’ll not reveal the details, but this scene on its own, right down to Maren’s last line in the scene, is brilliant.
As would be expected from director Luca Guadagnino, there are some really lovely shots and angles. Early on, Maren and a friend at a slumber party lay together beneath a glass-top coffee table. The sequence around the campfire is beautifully lit and eerie. While Maren is, herself, something of a monster, every setting in the film whether it’s a field or a mental hospital is leveraged quite well for tension.
But, seriously, what is this? There’s too much navel-gazing from the main characters for it to have the necessary clip and momentum of a straight-ahead horror film. And I am totally fine with horror that moves slow and build suspense, but this movie is all over the place. It’s riddled with half-hearted gestures at a theme.
In one scene, Maren and Lee sit in a barn where cattle are housed before slaughter. They muse about the fact that the cows have family and even friends. Okay, so is this a movie about being an ethical consumer? In other scenes, we learn things about Maren and Lee’s family that raise the idea of being an Eater as something hereditary. Okay, so is this a movie about patterns of violence/abuse/addiction being passed down through blood? Then, in the scene from which the title is taken, characters discuss cannibalism as being like a fulfilling act of sex or love. Okay, so is this a movie about emotions and the idea of love being a literally consuming thing?
If the movie had picked one idea and gone with it, I think you could have ended up with something visually and thematically interesting and engaging. But as it is, this is like a hodge-podge. I was genuinely baffled by the lack of nuance in a sequence where Maren is distraught after she and Lee eat a man who they did not realize had a family. But not once does Lee point out that a man who gleefully bullies children and has anonymous sex in the middle of the night with strange men is probably not the best husband and father.
I also always find myself incredibly annoyed when a movie makes it clear EXACTLY how it is going to end, and then gets there in a really contrived way. Some movies can telegraph their endings and still be brilliant, but that’s not the case here. At the climax of the film I felt no catharsis, just irritation.
Watchable, and worth watching for the campfire scene alone, but overall underwhelming.
Bones and All, 2022
Maren (Taylor Russell) is a young woman with an irrepressible desire to consume the flesh of other people. Shuffled from place to place by her father (Andre Holland), Maren wakes up one day to find that he has left her to navigate the world alone. With only some cash and her birth certificate on hand, Maren decides to make her way to Minnesota, where she hopes to find the mother she never knew. Along with way she finds that she’s not the only one of her kind. Meeting fellow “eater” Sully (Mark Rylance), Maren starts to learn the ropes. As she continues on her journey, she meets up with Lee (Timothee Chalamet), also afflicted with the insatiable hunger.
Trapped in largely unengaging space between straight-ahead horror and art-house allegory, a handful of promising scenes leave you wishing for what might have been.
To quote Folding Ideas host Dan Olsen, “Okay, so what . . . is this?”. There is a lot of great horror out there whose monsters and scenarios can easily be seen to double for all sorts of real-world terrors: addiction, infatuation, domestic violence, mental illness, etc. But while the construction of this film suggests a gesture at such an allegory, things just do not cohere in any kind of satisfying way.
There is some really good stuff scattered through the film. To begin with, I really liked Russell as the lead. She’s trying to navigate her own sense of survival and morality, and Russell does a good job of portraying someone who just keeps running up against versions of her life that she does not want. Chalamet is one of those actors who is very easily watchable. He’s got an understated charisma that’s well-suited to a character who largely doesn’t want to be noticed. Rylance walks a fine line between endearing and super-creepy as a man who keeps the hair of his victims in a long, braided rope that he carried in a satchel.
I also have to mention a scene in the film that, frankly, is an A+ as a short film within the larger movie around it. Maren and Lee end up around a campfire with two other Eaters, Jake (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Brad (David Gordon Green). In the flickering light, cracking cold beers, Jake tells the story of how he and Brad met. I’ll not reveal the details, but this scene on its own, right down to Maren’s last line in the scene, is brilliant.
As would be expected from director Luca Guadagnino, there are some really lovely shots and angles. Early on, Maren and a friend at a slumber party lay together beneath a glass-top coffee table. The sequence around the campfire is beautifully lit and eerie. While Maren is, herself, something of a monster, every setting in the film whether it’s a field or a mental hospital is leveraged quite well for tension.
But, seriously, what is this? There’s too much navel-gazing from the main characters for it to have the necessary clip and momentum of a straight-ahead horror film. And I am totally fine with horror that moves slow and build suspense, but this movie is all over the place. It’s riddled with half-hearted gestures at a theme.
In one scene, Maren and Lee sit in a barn where cattle are housed before slaughter. They muse about the fact that the cows have family and even friends. Okay, so is this a movie about being an ethical consumer? In other scenes, we learn things about Maren and Lee’s family that raise the idea of being an Eater as something hereditary. Okay, so is this a movie about patterns of violence/abuse/addiction being passed down through blood? Then, in the scene from which the title is taken, characters discuss cannibalism as being like a fulfilling act of sex or love. Okay, so is this a movie about emotions and the idea of love being a literally consuming thing?
If the movie had picked one idea and gone with it, I think you could have ended up with something visually and thematically interesting and engaging. But as it is, this is like a hodge-podge. I was genuinely baffled by the lack of nuance in a sequence where Maren is distraught after she and Lee eat a man who they did not realize had a family. But not once does Lee point out that a man who gleefully bullies children and has anonymous sex in the middle of the night with strange men is probably not the best husband and father.
I also always find myself incredibly annoyed when a movie makes it clear EXACTLY how it is going to end, and then gets there in a really contrived way. Some movies can telegraph their endings and still be brilliant, but that’s not the case here. At the climax of the film I felt no catharsis, just irritation.
Watchable, and worth watching for the campfire scene alone, but overall underwhelming.