To The Bone is an 2017 American drama film, written and directed by Marti Noxon and starring Lily Collins. It was released worldwide on Netflix on July 14 2017.
This movie revolves around Ellen, a 20 year old girl dealing with anorexia. Her step mother, who she lives with, sets her up with a specialist, Dr William Beckham, and had her enrolled in his program. She refused at first, but her step sister changed her mind.
The adventure starts in the rehabilitation house, where she lives with another six patients suffering from the same illness. There, she identifies herself as Eli, where she became close with everyone,especially Luke. Things then started to go wrong, where one of the patient, Megan, miscarried her baby for purging. Luke, who confessed his feelings to Eli got rejected and became handicapped.
To be really honest, the plot of the movie didn’t impress. There wasn’t much development on anything except from Ellen herself. Even so, it wasn’t the most insightful. We never really know how she started having the illness or how she actually recovers from it. This is true according to many reviewers of the movie including Bradshaw’s for The Guardian and O’Mally for Rogerebert. However, I still gained quite a bit of knowledge on the disease Anorexia itself, a real-life eating disorder affecting the lives of many people, especially adolescent women worldwide.
Ellen demonstrates the state of a sufferer’s mental state through her own life in the movie. Her face is so thin it looks sunk, she regularly measures the circumference of her arms with her palm, purges and exercises excessively in the middle of the night and plays with the food served in front of her instead of eating it. What I find quite impressive is how indifferent she seemed living with her illness and having all these habits, reminding us just how normal someone who suffers from Anorexia might be. I also appreciate that the movie made some effort in portraying how this disease affects the other patients. However, I do believe it could be more insightful than what they have brought to the table.
Below is the trailer for the movie.