Warning: MAJOR Bones And All SPOILERS Below
"Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them." John 6:56
"Do you think I'm a bad person?" asks Lee (Timothée Chalamet) late in Bones and All, moments after revealing to Maren (Taylor Russell) that he devoured his abusive father years prior. The two are "eaters," homeless and aimless, drifting across the American Midwest, abandoned by their families or opting for a more solitary existence thanks to their inborn taste for human flesh. The weight of Lee's past has hung over them since their first meeting, but only in this moment, after a couple of chance encounters with more nefarious examples of their kind and a traumatic reunion between Maren and her estranged mother is the cool, charismatic, emotionally calloused Lee able to admit the full weight of what he's done to survive in a world that, to paraphrase David Kajganich's screenplay, makes no room for monsters. "All I think is that I love you," Maren replies.
Like many contemporary horror films, Bones and All - directed by Luca Guadagnino (Suspiria 2018) and based on the YA novel from author Camille DeAngelis - uses cannibalism as a tool to explore marginalization, the ties that bind, and the human condition in all its hurt and profound emptiness, but it is also completely singular in the romantic treatment of its subject matter. Though the cannibal genre's big moment was during the '70s and '80s Italian boom, by the turn of the century, flesh eaters had morphed from offensive, exoticized caricatures into a more homegrown threat.
With the publication of Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs, its Oscar-decorated 1991 film adaptation, and the arrest of Jeffrey Dahmer that very same year, the cannibalistic killer was reskinned as the guy next door— a charming, well-dressed, typically white, and well-off figure of modern antisocial malaise and depravity. This human monster was scary and sexy, possessing a perverse allure that has endured to the present day. This is exemplified in projects like Bryan Fuller's cult favorite Hannibal TV series, and, more uncomfortably, in My Friend Dahmer and the recent record-smashing Netflix hit Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story in which onetime Disney heartthrob Ross Lynch and Ryan Murphy repertory player Evan Peters, respectively embody the serial killer.
Bones and All is easily the best feature to dig deep into the erotic allure of the modern cannibal story and examine the romantic sinews running through it, but it isn't the first. Most recently, the 2022 Hulu release Fresh uses rom-com tropes to inspired effect as a penetrating commentary on the casual (and not-so-casual) abuses women suffer at the hands of men and cheeky riposte to the #fannibal yearning to share a meal with Mads Mikkelsen or anyone who's ever composed a thirst tweet about Milwaukee's most famous serial killer.
Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as the unlucky-in-love Noa, who, after a protracted courtship with the charming Steve (Sebastian Stan), finds herself chained up in a remote vacation home where he carves up women to fill subscription boxes for wealthy male elites eager to sample feminine flesh. At first, Fresh may seem as if it's only interested in romance as a put-on, but it provides some toothsome food for thought in the way it explores male/female power dynamics and abuse. Though Steve is using Noa for her meat, he has a clear affection for her which she weaponizes against him to gain the upper hand, feigning interest in his gruesome business and discovering that he's not just an entrepreneur but a connoisseur. "It's about giving," he tells her over a bowl of linguine, dressed with a couple of meatballs that used to go by Hope. "Giving yourself over to somebody. Becoming one with somebody else, forever. [...] That's a beautiful thing. That's surrender. That's love."
This grotesquely capitalistic notion of desire commodified through the serving up of bodies is explored more overtly in Brandon Cronenberg's 2012 debut feature, Antiviral, in which dueling corporations offer diseases sourced from celebrities to their obsessed fans – selling "biological communion" between the adorer and adored. Though not strictly a cannibal film, it shows characters consuming human steaks grown from the muscle cells of these same celebrities. Unlike Steve in Fresh, the suppliers of Antiviral don't couch the ghoulish nature of their business in lofty romantic language, providing a far more cynical view of the need to possess another so badly that one would munch lab-grown flesh or mainline a strain of herpes just to feel a sense of closeness.
"Celebrities are not people, they're group hallucinations," says Joe Pingue as Arvid, proprietor of the celebrity meat market for whom Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) smuggles hot new diseases for sale on the black market. When Syd questions whether eating starlet steaks might be considered cannibalism, Arvid muses, "It all depends on whether the human being is found within its materials." The inseparability of body and soul so prevalent in Christian theology (from Eve being fashioned out of Adam's rib to the cannibalistic aberration of the Jewish Shabbat meal that is The Last Supper) is a central theme in this grouping of films. Even in something as caustic and satirical as Antiviral, which sees Landry Jones engage in a final act of anthropophagous devotion with the aura of a supplicant kissing the feet of a bronze saint.
Eckhart Schmidt's 1982 shocker, The Fan, not only finds divinity, but reincarnation in its tale of all-consuming desire. Simone (Désirée Nosbusch) is a teenager so unhealthily obsessed with a new wave singer named R (Bodo Staiger) that she hitchhikes to Munich on the off chance of meeting him. Against all odds, she catches the artist's eye and spends the day watching him rehearse for a TV appearance, after which he takes her to an apartment, has sex with her, and promptly gives her the brush off. Fantasy shattered, Simone caves in R's skull with a marble sculpture before dragging him into the kitchen and thoughtfully dismembering his body with an electric knife and almost holy reverence. After cooking a meal of his flesh, she grinds his bones into a fine powder, and hair shorn in grief, scatters his ashes. Simone returns home to resume her life: peace washing over her as she writes one last fan letter, speaking to R in voiceover and stating that not only will he always live within her, but that she's missed her period.
Schmidt's doomed anti-romance makes its Christ-like sacrifice/resurrection plainly allegorical, but two more German titles from the aughts are thoroughly rotten with erotic-religious allusions. Ulli Lommel and Marian Dora's direct-to-video monstrosities Diary of a Cannibal and Cannibal translate the biblical desire to "become one flesh" into revoltingly literal terms. Interestingly enough, Diary is the more palatable of the two, which Lommel made after assigning a project based on the real-life story of "The Rotenburg Cannibal" Armin Miewes to his acolyte, Dora, and supposedly finding it too gruesome. Diary concerns a young man named Adam (Trevor Parsons) who scours the internet seeking a "sensitive and open-minded female for the ultimate sacrifice." He finds his match in Noelle (Jillian Swanson), who, after some convincing, eventually takes him to an abandoned warehouse, affixes him to a Saint Andrew's Cross, removes his head and organs, and cooks the offal on a grill.
There's very little meat to the neutered and formless Diary of a Cannibal, but Lommel goes hog wild on biblical imagery and references, quoting scripture and equating love, both familial and erotic, with a transcendent sort of loss of the self. In Cannibal, Dora chews over the same quasi-religious physical destruction but conjures an entirely different beast with the film's graphic venereal fixations and violence. Unlike Diary, the consumer (Carsten Frank as "The Man") needs no convincing to dine upon the consumed (Victor Brandl as "The Flesh"), and there is plenty of homoerotic romping before the ingurgitation kicks off. "I'm your flesh," Brandl's character says upon first meeting The Man, who later dreamily states, "I can't wait to become one with you." The gore sequences are ghastly. The butchery of The Flesh's corpse takes up the bulk of the last thirty-or-so minutes, and despite what his characters say and do, Dora finds little emotional resonance in the cruelty – linking eros with the human death drive like two sickly, entwined serpents.
Similarly, Clair Denis's Trouble Every Day marries sex and death so effectively that it remains infamous today. The film focuses on Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo), who, along with his wife, June (Tricia Vessey), comes to Paris seeking Léo (Alex Descas), an old scientific colleague who may have secret knowledge about his violent desires. Unbeknownst to Shane, Léo's wife Coré (Béatrice Dalle) suffers from the same condition and spends her days boarded up in her room to keep her from roaming the countryside fucking and eating any man that crosses her path. Filled with dead nerve performances, there's still a raw, white-hot yearning beneath the cold, clinical surface. It's in the film's two set pieces - one in which Coré cavorts with and kills a young trespasser and the finale in which Shane rapes a maid - that the war between the carnal and philosophical is waged: our divine human qualities versus our lizard brains. In Trouble Every Day, Denis posits that the "little death" of orgasm is eternally perched on a razor's edge between creation and annihilation.
Bones and All is cut from the same cloth as Denis's film and its younger New French Extremity sister, Julia Ducournau's Raw, in that they both also present their character's cannibalistic hunger as an uncontrollable, natural urge. But both Raw and Guadagnino's film really cut to the bone in examining filial connections. In Raw's jaw-dropping conclusion, young veterinary student and burgeoning cannibal Justine (Garance Marillier) shares breakfast with her father, discussing her newly unleashed bloodlust. "I'm sure you'll find a solution, honey," he says, exposing his chest, which is ornamented with angry red gouges and long-healed scars – the implication being that Justine's mother is gripped with the same hunger that torments her. This is echoed briefly in Guadagnino's film when Lee lifts his shirt to reveal a ragged mark on his chest. We are to assume this scar was left in the struggle that led him to eat his father's flesh to keep from being consumed himself, conjuring mental images of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son in reverse. Maren's own reunion with her mother (Chloë Sevigny) is similarly savage and distressing. Perhaps the most disturbing element of these films is the way that the dividing line between erotic and parental love barely exists— viewing copulation, birth and death as the eternal giving and taking of flesh in a never-ending ouroboros-like cycle. This is best summed up by a scene in Diary of a Cannibal when Adam's mother says: "I love you so much, I don't know whether to kiss you or bite you, just gobble you up. You gave me such joy from the minute I felt you inside of me. I could have kept you in there for the rest of my life, being part of me."
Bones and All, like each film discussed here, sees in its characters' uncontrollable appetites the yearning to lose oneself in another (whether as a source of strength and solace or as a mechanism for destruction) and the diabolical urge of parents, lovers, corporate entities, monied elites, and even strangers, to either consume, commodify, or annihilate what they long to possess. After the violent struggle in the film's last act, a not-long-for-this-world Lee demands that Maren make a final meal of his blood-soaked body and leave nothing behind. It's at once a perverse, tender, and tragic moment, and one that occurs all too suddenly after the two have finally realized that the home they were seeking was in each other all along. Lee's final words resonate so powerfully because, as troubling as each of these films are, DeAngelis and Guadagnino create a world where there is room for monsters, and to love truly is to give oneself over to another, to become one flesh, to return to wholeness from two halves: not just to be consumed with someone, but to be consumed by them, head, heart, bones and all.
Bones And All is now playing in theaters.
