This piece contains spoilers for Bones and All and The Lighthouse.
Bones and All and The Lighthouse are two very unique horror films that travel back in time to bend reality, and to speak on common aspects of humanity that are always present in life. I am not the biggest lover of horror films, and I actually tend to avoid them, especially if they are excessively gory. However, when I saw the trailers for these films I had to watch them. Despite their graphic nature, they were powerful, disturbing, and thrilling to watch. These two films are driven by many similar tensions and themes. Masturbation and lust for a female body openly sheds light on sexuality in both films. Loneliness is another significant theme. An additional connection between the films are the secrets that the characters hold within themselves.
“Bones and All” – Free Malaysia Today.
Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All is a 2022 film starring Taylor Russell as the protagonist Maren, and Timothée Chalamet who plays Lee. It is set in the late 1980s and follows Maren who is an 18-year-old cannibal on her journey to find her mother. Her beloved father had recently abandoned her due to Maren’s insatiable urge to feed on other human beings. Early in Maren’s search for her mother she is approached by an eccentric, mentally unstable middle-aged man named Sully. Sully quickly forms a disturbing and obsessive attachment to Maren, and follows her discreetly throughout the rest of the film.
Love, however, seems to be the central theme of this film. It is not long after Maren and Lee meet while shoplifting at a store that they show their love for each other. They show this by providing each other with sustenance by feeding on people who seem to have no family; by comforting each other when they feel like they are bad people for feeding on other humans; and by protecting each other from other cannibals or “eaters.” All Maren and Lee are looking for is to be loved, and to try to be good people. When Maren fails to find love and guidance in her mother, who she discovers to be living in a mental hospital, she seeks love and comfort in Lee instead.
Secrecy is another tension which drives the film. This is most visible in Lee’s character as he doesn’t stay in one place too long. When he briefly returns home to visit his sister we learn that their father had left them a couple years prior. Later Maren talks to Lee’s sister and discovers that their father was abusive, and that when Lee’s father was killed Lee was a suspect which caused him to go on the run. At a moment many months later, when Maren and Lee are alone on a hill overlooking vast grassy plains, Maren urges Lee to talk about his father which Lee begrudgingly agrees to do. He tells her that his father had hit him and his sister, and had tried to eat him so he fought his father, bound him, put him in an abandoned barn for a couple of days, then returned to the barn to eat his own father. Lee smiles ruefully and cries after he says this. He notes that although he enjoyed doing so, he feels like a bad person that would probably be better off dead. Maren tries to comfort him, telling him that that is not true, and that she loves him.
Sexual themes are also present, for instance, Lee masturbates another man that he encounters at a carnival, in order to seduce the man and kill him among the seclusion of a cornfield, securing a meal for Maren and himself. Oddly, this act only begins to unsettle Maren deeply after they find out that the man they had killed and consumed alive had a family. Furthermore, Sully’s pervasive interest in Maren is clear, especially, their final encounter with Sully when he catches Maren alone in her apartment, forces himself on top of her on a bed, gives her a kiss on the cheek, and tells her how much he wants to be loved and cared for. Sadly, Maren and Lee’s tumultuous love story comes to an abrupt and violent end by this encounter with Sully, which leaves Lee with a fatal stab wound to his lung. In one disturbing last act of love, Maren eats Lee alive after giving in to his pleas for her to do so.
“The Lighthouse” – Deviant Art.
Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse is a 2019 film set on a stormy New England island in the 1890s. The film stars Robert Pattinson as the protagonist first introduced to the audience as Ephraim Winslow, the newly hired “wickie” or lighthouse keeper who is very guarded and curious. His boss Thomas Wake is played by Willem Dafoe. Wake is a former sailor who displays himself as a demanding yet lively man, who farts almost as often as he barks orders at Winslow. Wake has devoted his entire being to maintaining the lighthouse, particularly the light. The light is probably the most important element in the film, and carries its own mysterious and alluring power within it, which drives the actions of these two men.
As time goes on, Winslow soon begins to notice strange occurrences. For instance, late at night Wake will sneak up to the top of the lighthouse, undress himself completely, then bask in the glow of the light which seems to transport him to another plane of existence, seemingly to salvation. Winslow also has unsettling encounters and visions of mermaids which bluntly represent his sexuality, and fervent desire for that kind of pleasure. Winslow’s sexuality is presented more abstractly and graphically when he seems to lose grip on his sanity. Examples of this are when he finds a siren laying naked on the rocks by the ocean that wakes up and screeches at him after he touches her. He is also shown to have intercourse with a mermaid which seems to be another one of his delusions.
After the four weeks of Winslow’s labor are up, he and Wake wait for a ship to free Winslow from the island, but an unrelenting and violent storm prevents a ship from landing on the island. It then becomes impossible to determine how long they have been on the island. This leads to the two men getting drunk every night, sharing their darkest secrets with each other, and Winslow losing his sanity completely. We are also told that Winslow’s real name is Thomas Howard, and Wake’s previous wickie died after losing his sanity. However, Winslow/Howard later accuses Wake of murdering his former wickie, after Winslow/Howard discovered the skull of a severed head among the rocks on the island.
In Bones and All, Maren and Lee are seen as monsters, and are othered by the rest of humanity because they are cannibals that can endanger any person’s life. They are both lonely young people who find comfort in each other. Furthermore, the life of a lighthouse keeper seems to be a lonely one, especially if the only company is your boss. Winslow/Howard seems to be a lost man who wants a normal and content life, and is trying to work for it honestly. However, the guilt of his past misdeeds eat away at him, and contribute to his delusions, and the destabilization of his reality. The protagonists of these two films all appear to be lost individuals who struggle with living within society, and are burdened by the lives they had a role in taking in their pasts. Unfortunately, they all fail to live happily as any chance of living a content, peaceful life among society is not an opportunity for any of them at the end of both films.