Spoilers for Bones and All (2022).
In Bones and All, Mark Rylance's villainous Sully might not be a real person and could, in reality, be a figment of the troubled Maren's imagination. Bones and All isn't a straightforward movie by any means. The road trip cannibal drama stars Taylor Russel's Maren and Timothee Chalamet's Lee as a pair of young outcasts struggling with their cannibalism. This seemingly inherited trait derails their attempts to live a normal life. As the summary implies, Bones and All is a thorny, complex movie and one that is open to numerous interpretations. The role of Sully, played by an alternately charming and terrifying Mark Rylance, is evidence of this.
One theory about the ending of Bones and All is that Maren's nemesis Sully is not real. The villain is instead a living embodiment of her inability to contain her maddening hunger. While Sully appears throughout Bones and All, the strange villain exclusively interacts with Maren until the movie's ending. The ending of Bones and All sees Sully kill Lee by stabbing him in the lung while Lee and Maren suffocate Sully, but the fact that Lee encourages Maren to eat him as he dies could imply that Sully was never a real person, but rather a way for Maren to externalize her struggle with ignoring her affliction while trying to live normally.
Bones & All's Sully Explained
Sully is the strangest character in the universally offbeat cast of Bones and All. Shortly after Maren's father abandons her at the beginning of the movie, Bones and All's heroine encounters Sully for the first time. He tells her that he can smell their kind and offers her a meal, with the pair eventually consuming an elderly woman in her empty house shortly after she dies. Maren is unnerved by Sully's forthright attitude toward his cannibalism, the long rope of woven hair he acquired from his victims, and his insistence that the pair should travel together going forward. Instead, Maren leaves him behind and incurs his wrath as a result, although this scene (and their later interactions) might not show the whole truth.
Why Maren May Be Imagining Sully
Maren is alone when she first encounters Sully, and while Lee says he might have heard a word about the character when Maren first describes him, it's a non-commital comment. Furthermore, Sully does not return until Lee and Maren are separated, meaning Maren is once again alone when she encounters Sully for the second time. This time. Sully uses some choice language to insult Maren, but none of the onlookers at the grocery store where their confrontation takes place seem to notice an older man swearing at a young girl while trying to convince her to get into his van. However, the ending does depict Lee interacting with Sully, which contradicts this theory.
That said, this scene could be read as Maren's cannibalistic urges finally spilling over on an otherwise idyllic day. By that point in the story, the pair have sworn off cannibalism and held down respectable jobs for some time, only for Maren to come home one evening and find the hair of Lee's sister added to Sully's rope. The real meaning of Bones and All could be that the movie's cannibalism is an allegory for addiction. While Maren and Lee could suppress their urges to live a socially sanctioned normal life for some time, eventually, their repressed desire rose to the surface and Lee encouraged Maren to accept her flaws by eating him.
What Sully Represents For Maren
With his nonchalant attitude toward cannibalism and claims that he never kills his victims, Sully is a seductive face for Maren's addiction. He has a psychical or mental impediment that makes his speech and movement unusual, contributing to the sense that he is a harmless, sympathetic figure. If Sully is an anthropomorphization of Maren's addiction, she envisions her habit as lonely, somewhat tragic, but ultimately not lethal. All of this harmlessness, however, proves to be an act when Sully turns violent at the end of Bones and All. Earlier in Bones and All, Maren is distressed by the thought that her cannibalism would make her a monster, which is what the seemingly sweet Sully proves.
Seeing the hair of Lee's young sister on Sully's braid proves that he does kill some victims, as there is no reason to think the healthy teenager would have died of natural causes. Not only that, but Sully holding down Maren and putting a knife to her throat is further evidence of the underlying menace that his character always hid under the surface. In this reading, Maren's desperation to save Lee's life and Lee's gleeful, romantic declaration that she should eat him "bones and all" is also the culmination of Sully's purpose as an externalized image of her addiction. Lee tells Maren to embrace her cannibalism rather than using the idea of Sully to displace and suppress her hunger.
Why This Bones & All Theory Could Be Wrong
While Sully could be a figment of Maren's imagination, that doesn't mean this theory is the only way to read his character. Even if Sully does exist within the world of Bones and All, he can still function as a foil to Lee and Maren (like the isolated creepy cannibals they meet in the woods). His willingness to accept his status as an outsider is contrasted with Maren's inability to understand her hunger for human flesh. His duplicitous claims that he doesn't harm his victims are contrasted with Lee's ission that the cannibal lifestyle isn't compatible with an ordinary moral code. Whether or not Sully is real in Bones and All, his character serves the same purpose as Maren and Lee's story.
Sully provides a contrast with Maren and Lee that leads viewers to empathize with the young couple despite the brutal reality of their cannibalism. He has been systematically targeting victims for decades is in stark contrast with the improvisational, unplanned mania of Lee and Maren's killings, and his cruelty toward Maren is contrasted with Lee and Maren's surprisingly tender romantic relationship. The main reason Sully might be a real character within the world of Bones and All is that his function in the movie's story is not majorly altered either way. Bones and All doesn't need Sully to be imaginary for his role in the movie's story to make sense, so this theory could complicate an otherwise straightforward story.
