The average movie trailer these days does little more than it’s meant to do: promote the movie. And that is perfectly fine, if a little boring. A lot of people disavow themselves of even watching trailers at all, for fear of being spoiled. We’d rather watch the actual film!
But Bones and All’s first full trailer has arrived to challenge the anti-trailer contingent to reconsider their position. Set to the gravelly, bass-heavy Leonard Cohen song “You Want It Darker,” it’s basically a mini music video—edited in time to the song’s beat, cuts falling in tandem with the drum beat, shots held alongside sustained notes. As Cohen sings about “a lullaby for suffering,” darkness and violence abound, both lyrically and visually.
And blood. There’s a lot of blood. Bones and All is a love story about teen cannibals traveling across the Midwest, after all; they spend the movie gorging on bodies and wiping the blood off their faces and fingernails. While Marin (Taylor Russell) is coming to terms with her innate hunger for human flesh, her new friend-turned-lover Lee (Timothée Chalamet) has accepted his lot in life.
“I didn’t know I had permission/ to murder and to maim,” Cohen sings, as if he is Marin, uncertain how far she can go with her cannibalistic desires. Lee, meanwhile, is the one teaching her that murder is the name of the game, as we watch him slash a man’s throat, walk out of an abandoned shack with blood on his chest, and ponder his existence while the blood of his latest victim stains his cheeks.
We also get glimpses of Chalamet and Russell’s co-stars: Mark Rylance, who plays the mysterious older cannibal Sully; Michael Stuhlbarg, an unhinged man who Marin and Lee meet on their cross-country journey; and a very brief look at one big star, whose role I dare not spoil. (I’ll let you spot her for yourself. She’s nearly unrecognizable.)
If Bones and All had nothing more than this Leonard Cohen-scored clip package to show for itself, it would be one of the most visually engrossing pieces of art of 2022. Good thing the actual movie, according to The Daily Beast’s review from its Venice premiere, is “a moody, achingly romantic triumph” in its own right.
Bones and All hits select theaters Nov. 18, before expanding nationwide on Nov. 23.
