To the Bone

To the Bone (2017) is about a twenty year old woman with anorexia, written by someone who lived it. Ellen has been thrown out of several programmes. Her family places her in a last one run by a specialist. The house is not a clinic; six people live together, there are few rules and nobody is forced. The doctor's method is that the person decides whether they want to recover. Ellen knows calorie counts by heart, separates her food into pieces and counts the bruises on her arm. The film shows these behaviours in detail and that caused argument: some specialists said it teaches method. Marti Noxon wrote and directed it and has said she had an eating disorder in her youth. Lily Collins said the same of herself and lost weight for the part, stating she did so under supervision. That decision was criticised too. The family is the best thing in it: nobody means harm, none of it works, and each of them insists on a different solution. Keanu Reeves plays the doctor. It premiered at Sundance and Netflix took it; it was released with a content warning. The final section offers no realistic resolution and stays too symbolic. It runs 107 minutes. Good for: drama about mental health and work drawn from personal experience. Less good for: eating disorder behaviour is shown in detail and it may be triggering if the subject is close.