Timothée Chalamet is truly eating the scenery “Bones and All,” if that scenery includes vagrants, lost souls, and vagabonds.
Chalamet reunites with “Call Me By Your Name” director Luca Guadagnino for cannibal love story “Bones and All,” co-starring “Waves” breakout Taylor Russell. Per the official synopsis, the film is a story of first love between Maren (Russell), a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee (Chalamet), an intense and disenfranchised drifter, as they meet and join together for a thousand-mile odyssey which takes them through the back roads, hidden passages, and trap doors of Ronald Reagan’s America.
While Maren and Lee lust for blood (and each other), all roads seem to lead back to their terrifying pasts and a final stand that will determine whether their love can survive their otherness.
The film premieres November 23 in theaters and screens at 2022 New York Film Festival, following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The “Bones and All” ensemble cast includes Mark Rylance, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloë Sevigny, and “Halloween Ends” writer-director David Gordon Green. “Bones and All” is written by “Suspiria” scribe David Kajganich and adapted from Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 YA novel.
Director Guadagnino told IndieWire that “only Timothée can play this role” in a cannibal love story that is distinctly not in the horror genre.
“I think ‘Suspiria’ was aggressively provocative. I think this one is much more serene in its sense of self,” Guadagnino previously said. “My true hope is that the audience doesn’t reject the movie as a provocation because it deals with a taboo like cannibalism.”
Guadagnino continued, “With ‘Bones and All,’ I wasn’t interested at all in the shock value, which I hate. I was interested in these people. I understood their moral struggle very deeply. I understood what was happening to them. I am not there to judge anybody. You can make a movie about cannibals if you’re there in the struggle with them, and you’re not codifying cannibalism as a topic or a tool for horror.”
The IndieWire review called the film a “star-making turn” for Russell and speaks to numerous layers of modern love. “The film opens itself up successfully to myriad readings, potentially speaking about everything from intergenerational trauma, to queer love, to addiction … But ‘Bones & All is fundamentally a beautifully realized and devastating, tragic romance which at multiple moments would have Chekhov himself weeping as the trigger is pulled.”
“Bones and All” premieres November 23 in theaters.
Check out the trailer below.
