Freddie Beddington

 One way of thinking about eating, is as taking away a part of the world in order to keep ourselves going. ‘Bones and All’, the 2022 film about cannibals directed by Luca Guadagnino, takes this idea to its logical end. The two main characters, Lee and Maren, are part of a group of people called “eaters”, who have strong desires to eat other people. For Lee and Maren, to survive is to take someone away from the world. Ultimately, the film explores the destruction inherent in relationships: asking how far we will go to survive.  Lee and Maren are drifters, who because of their desires cannot integrate into society. They have both left home, and most of the movie follows them travelling across America together. It is essentially a road trip film; they move from state to state with no real purpose or goal. At first, their relationship is a pragmatic one. They are both alone and are simply looking to survive; they recognise their solitude in each other and decide to help each other...

  At the end of ‘The Brutalist’ we are told that it is not the journey that matters, but the destination. As we look at the result of László’s work across the 3.5 hour runtime, a concrete and marble tribute to a dead woman, with a cross made of light shining at its centre, this becomes the question.   Was it worth it?   Is everything he went through, everything he did to the people around him, justified by beauty? More generally speaking, how much of these experiences are contained in the work?  Throughout the film we see people struggling with dilemmas. Harrison Lee wants to create something beautiful, but cannot handle how ugly the process of creating that thing is. Similarly, he celebrates modernity and forward-thinking but is held back by his prejudice. Erzsébet is torn between her love for her husband and the dark path his ambition is taking him down; she sees the importance of his work but struggles to cope with the toll it takes on them.  For László,...