Now that I’m older, I try, as a rule, to not talk too deeply about things I don’t understand.

The first time I saw To The Bone, that was my overarching thought: I don’t understand this. This is an illness I cannot relate to, and trying to cobble together some kind of empathy narrative would be disrespectful and unkind.

In this movie, Lily Collins plays Ellen, a young artist with anorexia nervosa whose illness has progressed to such a point that she is nearing death. Keanu Reeves is the “unconventional” — although the film never explains how — doctor, William Beckham, who leads an inpatient program for people with eating disorders.

Much of the film takes place inside a residential home where Ellen and a small group of young women, and one man, essentially try to gain weight. It’s more complex than that, of course. They have group and individual therapy. They have to abide by certain rules, like not leaving the table during mealtimes, even if they don’t eat.

Ellen carries a unique burden. One of her drawings, which she posted on Tumblr, led to a young woman’s suicide. Dr. Beckham tells her not to stop creating art, but to keep it to herself, at least for the moment.

This mirrors some real-life reactions to To The Bone, whose initial trailer sparked concerns it could cause harm to those in recovery.

The controversy, which I read about before I watched the film, surprised me. To The Bone was written and directed by Marti Noxon, who was a driving force behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a kind of feminist and queer tour de force. I found it hard to believe she would fuck something like this up.

And I don’t think she did. Hence the not talking about things I don’t fully understand. There is a real worry, from what I gather, that the images of Ellen’s skeletal frame could be inspirational for some, and thus this piece of art could perpetuate the kind of damage it’s trying to illuminate.

At one point in the film, Dr. Beckham takes the group to an art installation comprised of rain towers. The point is that they are alive, and life could be beautiful. This moved me not just because of what it said about the virtues of living, but the virtues of art for art’s sake. About the virtues of sensory experience, like feeling rain on your body when the distance between what’s inside your head and the rest of the world seems vast and empty.

Dr. Beckham suggests Ellen change her name. She settles on Eli. Late in the film her mother — who had been distant through most of the piece, leaving Ellen’s treatment largely spearheaded by her stepmother, her father never seen, but often discussed — laments that Ellen was her great-grandmother’s name.

Which makes the point about why changing one’s name is often the best thing to help you through recovery. Our names are given to us, and connect us to generations of baggage. Legacy names are sometimes filled with power and resilience, but also threads of expectation, burden, and wearing the skin that isn’t our own.

The one male member of the house, Luke, makes a sexual advance towards Eli. They’d had a growing romantic connection, but he comes on to her aggressively, after asking invasive questions about her sexual history and implications of abuse. When she rejects him, she smartly makes the point that often when people claim to love you, they’re actually acting in self-interest.

Later on in the film, when Luke discovers he cannot go back to being a dancer because of an injury, he says to Eli, “I need you.” He is, as Eli says at one point, the “den mother” of the house, pushing everyone to eat, but he is still managing his own illness. His motivations are not untainted, and she’s right to set her boundaries.

Luke is an uncomfortable character. He, too, had seen Eli’s artwork online. He’d posted it in his room a year prior, before meeting her. When she says she’s only known him a few weeks, he claims to have known her for two years, through her artwork. But of course he doesn’t know her — he knows what he’s chosen to see in her art. The art has a right to exist — inside and outside the film — but it is subjective and stands apart from its creator.

To The Bone has a dream-like conclusion — complete with a dream — that allows Eli the breathing space to step away from the noise of her family, her housemates, and her doctors. The scenes bring to the surface how deep the scars of trauma can go, how it’s transferred like a virus from one family member to another, and how long and challenging it can be to heal.

There’s real beauty here, and it’s the kind that’s not reduced to the exploitative beauty of pain. There is hope, optimism, recovery. Seen with the right eyes, To The Bone is a vehicle of light.

March 2022