Timothée Chalamet's cannibal romance Bones And All will devour your heart

Following the exquisite heartache of Call Me By Your Name, his Oscar-winning portrait of young, queer love found and then lost, director Luca Guadagnino made a surprising genre pivot to horror for his next film, Suspiria. But as unexpected a follow-up as a remake of Dario Argento’s Giallo classic might have seemed on paper, Guadagnino’s signature sincerity and depth of feeling made the film itself both an undeniable expression of his auteur voice and the rare remake to refreshingly assert its own unique identity.

With Bones And All, Guadagnino makes his second foray into horror, reuniting with Suspiria screenwriter David Kajganich for an adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ young adult novel that feels at once more grisly and more distinctively heartfelt than the pair’s first stab at the genre. There’s no individual sequence in Bones And All as nightmarish as the one early on in Suspiria when Dakota Johnson’s dancing causes a threatening interloper’s body to contort into a helpless, bone-snapped pretzel, but the sheer quantity of torn flesh and bloody jowls on display make it a more graphically violent film than its predecessor. At the same time, though, what lingers most powerfully is the haunting sense of loneliness and isolation that plague its two adolescent cannibal protagonists, who find a much-needed connection with each other to compensate for their estrangement from the normal society of ’80s-era, small-town America.

The term “cannibal” isn’t quite right, though—in the film’s own parlance, the characters who suffer a genetically inherited disorder that requires them to feast on other humans for survival are referred to simply as “eaters.” At the story’s start, high-schooler Maren (Taylor Russell) has no awareness that she is an eater, trusting that her strict father (André Holland) has his reasons for frequently moving the two of them from town to town and keeping her sheltered from any social activities with her peers.

But one night when she sneaks out her bedroom window to hang out with a few school friends, she is startled to find herself so overtaken by this hunger that she compulsively begins feeding on a friend before rushing out in a confused panic. Her dad, having prepared for this very moment for years, quickly moves them to another town, and soon after abandons her with no notice, leaving behind a wad of cash and an audio tape he recorded filling her in on the details and history of her inescapably homicidal condition.

Learning that the eater gene was passed on by a mother (Chloë Sevigny) she knows nothing else about, Maren sets out alone on a road trip across the vast Midwest to find her. An old, creepy eater named Sully (Mark Rylance) finds her at a bus stop—experienced eaters have the ability to detect each other through scent—and shows her the ropes of the drifting, home-invading eater lifestyle he sustains. Once she flees his grasp, she comes across a confident, punk rock-styled eater her own age, Lee (Timothée Chalamet), who eventually joins her on her quest to locate her mother.

Chalamet unforgettably launched to movie star status in Call Me By Your Name, and for this second collaboration with Guadagnino, the director has gifted him with a role that showcases both his uninhibited brashness—the actor’s ardent fans will go nuts for an impromptu dance he does set to “Lick It Up” by KISS at one point—and his touchingly raw vulnerability. But Bones And All is even more Maren’s story than it is Lee’s, and Russell’s disarmingly pure and authentic lead performance deserves to put her on the star firmament alongside Chalamet. As she previously demonstrated in director Trey Edward Shults’ underseen family tragedy Waves, Russell possesses an artifice-free emotional directness as a performer. A big part of what makes the film so moving is watching as Maren, infused with that directness by Russell, chips away at the too-cool-for-school walls that Lee has put up to get to know and love the real him.

The movie’s affection for its characters extends even to the sinister Sully, who desperately clings to Maren out of a paternal impulse he has no safe, healthy way of channeling elsewhere. The reliably brilliant Rylance, outfitted with a rotting set of fake chompers and a dangling rattail of hair, makes him a figure even more poignant than he is spooky. As a result, the film’s only major storytelling lapse is when it tries to jam Sully into a limiting “villain” box for a contrived climax that feels too conventional for what’s otherwise a handcrafted horror/romance gem that unconventionally connects its gore to a piercing sense of loss and melancholy instead of to the demands of the mainstream horror formula.

As a love story centered on two teenage outcasts finding themselves and each other, Bones And All has as much in common with Guadagnino’s wonderfully lush HBO miniseries We Are Who We Are as it does with Suspiria. That long-form project’s gorgeous Italian setting is obviously more inviting, though Guadagnino is just as evocative in rendering Bones And All’s haunted middle America. The dusty windows, half-evaporated puddles, and intimidating power lines that jarringly clash with unspoiled stretches of nature beautifully reflect the desolation felt by the marginalized central characters.

Guadagnino’s formidable crew deserves credit for shaping the movie’s world too, including Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and regular film composing partner Atticus Ross, who contribute a striking score that imaginatively combines spare acoustic strumming with intense synthesizer blasts. Like Bones And All itself, it’s simultaneously freaky and from the heart in a special, singular way.