Bones And All

Love blossoms between a young woman on the margins of society and a disenfranchised drifter as they embark on a 3,000-mile odyssey through the backroads of America. However, despite their best efforts, all roads seem to lead them right back to the terrifying pasts that they’re trying to run away from, where a final stand will determine whether their love can survive their differences.

That synopsis weirdly doesn’t mention a very specific and central part of the film, which I will go into now…

So, Maren has a bit of a condition, and that condition is that she can’t stop eating human flesh. As a vampire of sorts, but only in the way that she has a really good sense of smell, and also eats people, this condition has led to a few…ummm… issues at home, mostly related to her eating people, so now she’s an arty teen on her own and out on the open road.

She wears big dresses and bigger boots.

While traveling, she meets a fellow “Eater” named Sully. Sully is an older fellow who couldn’t be any more clear about being a creepy weirdo if he had been wearing a big sandwich board that spelled it out. But Sully isn’t the only Eater Marin meets. She also meets Lee. Lee is terminally cool, and so very very tortured and brooding because of it. Lee and Marin fall in love in a way that only a pair of trash bag crusty punks can. They’re like the song “Love grows where my Rosemary goes,” if by “where my Rosemary goes” you mean “eating people.”

Set in a seeminly 1980s world of endless stretches of rural America, in run-down post-industrial towns both big and small, on back country roads in the middle of nowhere, and in nearly empty, fly-blown bus stations, Bones And All is one part YA Vampire Romance, one part bloody vampire horror, one part the story of a young woman as she navigates the dangers that comes from being a young woman in the world, and one part an examination of the violence that is inherent in the life of the privileged and entitled in the way that they allow themselves to inflict harm on others in order to ensure their own small comforts and conveniences. This film is a lot of things, some of it almost great, some of it not so much, but one thing is for certain, being primarily concerned with a narrative arc is not one of them. It’s really more about vibes.

That’s basically the main problem.

But the truth is… who cares? This movie is for arty teens, for the “disaffected” youth, for the “let’s go get sushi and not pay” crowd. If it were a book, its cover art would look like a zine. In fact, if you are currently an arty and disaffected teen with a zine, holy shit, do I have a movie for you.

Before we move on, I do want to add, I really liked how the film used the stray ephemera of pictures and mementos left behind in the houses of the various people that were had for dinner, not just to give some shape to the victims’ lives, but also to illustrate the fragile nature of that shape.

That was a really nice bit.