Bones & All is the latest film from Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino and is based on the novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis. While the film brings us everyone’s favorite son Timothée Chalamet as Lee alongside the brilliance of Taylor Russell as Maren, it is also a fascinating story of being an outcast and trying to find those who understand you and love you for the things you can’t control.
The new trailer for the film highlights horrors of Maren’s journey to find answers to who she is and why she is this way, mixed with new moments that are not there in the book. And what I love about the trailer is that it feels like even more of a love story than what we got in DeAngelis’ work. In the book, the story is told from Maren’s perspective, and we know of her feelings for Lee and her desire to do the “bad thing” with boys she’s attracted to, but Lee is different because he is like her.
So their journey isn’t the easiest, and what we see in the official trailer is Lee and Maren on the road together mixed with the horror elements that the book also has and, much like the book, this trailer has its hooks in me and won’t let go.
The devouring nature of Bones & All
When I heard the news that Luca Guadagnino was making a cannibal love story, my thirst thought was “why?” mainly because I was terrified of cannibals as a kid. And yet reading DeAngelis’ work and seeing what this story actually is makes labeling it a “cannablistic” love story almost too simple. That is, on paper, what this story is but it is also so much more than that.
In the novel, Maren is a young girl who is abandoned by her mother once she does the “bad thing” once again. The “cannibal” part of the story isn’t something that Maren is doing on purpose. Instead, it’s this animalistic instinct that takes over the eaters, where they consume a human in their entirety in record time.
The book makes note that Lee is fast in his eating and it is often in minutes that he completely devours someone. For Maren, she’s trying desperately to find answers to why she is the way that she is. She meets Sully (who is going to be played by Mark Rylance in the film) who hints that the “bad thing” might run in families, and since her father left them (which she assumes was after she did the bad thing to her childhood babysitter), she goes off to search for him for answers.
She meets Lee when she’s abandoned by someone she was using for a ride at a Wal-Mart, and Lee is there and can instantly tell that she is an eater too, and the story becomes a quest to find acceptance and understanding between two people who have deemed themselves monsters for something that is, seemingly, out of their control.
The difference in the trailer
I’m very excited to see this movie, given how quickly I inhaled (pun intended) this book, but right off the bat, I can tell that the film is giving Maren and Lee more of a love story than the book did. Again, the book is in first-person perspective, so we can read all about Maren’s jealousy and her feeling towards Lee in how she’s talking about him, but for the most part, the two do not really kiss or show their affection for one another in ways that would be labeled as “PDA.” They do things that show they care, but it’s not an outright romance. It’s more of two people who were loners finding each other and being too afraid to open up.
This trailer is more of a romance look at the story, which I think is going to work well since we don’t get to have Maren’s unique perspective in the way we did with the book. I also wonder what changes will be made to the book’s plot.
Overall, this trailer feels like a faithful adaptation that also seems to add more to these characters and flesh them out, in the way that Guadagnino did with Call Me By Your Name, so I’m so very excited to finally get to see Bones & All when it comes out on November 23, 2022.
(featured image: MGM)
