By Stephanie Bunbury

Timothee Chalamet and Taylor Russell star in Bones and All.Credit:@Julianunganostudio

You are what you eat. Or do you eat what you are? Luca Guadagnino, whose lush gay romance Call Me By Your Name won the hearts of arthouse audiences back in the unthinkably distant times before COVID, has now made a film about two young cannibals, Maren and Lee, played by Taylor Russell and Timothee Chalamet. They are eaters, in the film’s terminology: slaves to a hereditary urge they can’t suppress. Even so, they still manage to fall in love in the halting, nervous but all-consuming way that teenagers do. They reflect each other, Russell says, “in a way that feels very life-affirming and expansive. I think that’s ultimately what we all want.”

Bones and All certainly set tongues wagging at the Venice Film Festival, where it was first shown, before winning Guadagnino the Silver Lion as best director. Not so much because it is gory – we see the eaters with faces bloodied after gnawing on a body, but the gnawing itself is in long shot or unseen – or conventionally scary, but because it isn’t either of these things. It takes the cannibals on their own terms, which Guadagnino relishes as the film’s real challenge to accepted taboos.

“I think one of the greatest taboos is the otherness of the Other: the fact that you have to welcome that otherness, not tolerate it,” he says, gazing out at the Grand Canal from the picture windows at the Cipriani hotel. We are a world away from the low-rent towns of the American midwest, where Bones and All was shot. “[Philosopher] Slavoj Zizek said this very clearly and very beautifully, that it is an easy thing to say ‘I believe in a progressive world where we have to help the other, people who have less than us’. It is another thing actually to accept the scandal of that otherness. Not to try to tame it.”

Bones and All is based on a critically successful 2015 YA novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis. David Kajganich, who adapted it, also worked with Guadagnino on the scripts for A Bigger Splash – a drama about a rock star’s festering menage, with Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes – and Suspiria, his indifferently received remake of Dario Argento’s horror classic. Most recently, he made a documentary about shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo and a tremendous long-form television fiction about young people living on an American army base on the Venetian lagoon, We Are Who We Are.

“I am always drawn back to teenagers, I don’t know why,” says Guadagnino, who is 51. Maybe he still feels like one, he jokes. “I know, wake up! But I do believe a lot of my ambitions, a lot of my ideas, a lot of my aims have been seeded between the years of 13 and 20. And I am still there in a way, trying to execute the megalomaniac plan I had for myself. The idea of wanting to be a director is megalomaniac. To summon people to give you so much money for something you have in your mind, then to simulate eating human flesh: that’s megalomania.”

Timothee Chalamet and Taylor Russell star in Bones and All.Credit:@Julianunganostudio

Maren lives in a trailer with her father. She seems to be doing well at a new school until an incident with one of her classmates, involving a sleepover and a bitten finger, proves to be the last scandal he can handle and he leaves for good before the police arrive. Despairing, she sets off to find her mother, a shadowy figure who disappeared years before and is rarely mentioned.

“What struck me was that most of the people of their world are men,” says Russell, a Canadian actress who, at 28, is one of cinema’s rising stars; among a slew of recent awards, she took out the Marcello Mastroianni gong for best new talent in Venice for her performance in Bones and All. “[Maren’s] life’s journey is to try to find her mom,” she says. “She’s going to know. She’s going to have answers. Talking to older women who have gone through things that I’m going through is the greatest gift in my life. I understand what that means, to try to look for that. And how violent the world can feel without it.”

On the road, Maren soon discovers not only what she is, but that other “eaters” can sniff her out. Her first inkling that she is part of an outsider fraternity is her meeting with Sully (Mark Rylance), who shows her the ropes: how to find someone nigh unto death, maybe with a pile of mail indicating nobody else comes by too often, then killing and eating without making too much mess. Sully latches on to this fresh-faced young woman with a stalker’s silky determination.

Then she meets Lee, just a couple of years older, all dyed hair and affected cynicism thinly veiling a terror of being lost in the world. In the first script Chalamet saw, Lee was a sports jock who lorded it over Maren with a show of macho bravado and a naive certainty that he had everything figured out. “Someone I would not be right to play!” he says with a laugh. “And it didn’t seem so interesting to me, or feel truthful either. What did seem interesting, true to this social isolation we’ve all been feeling with COVID, was to play someone who was only surviving by way of the stories he was telling himself. To lean into the fragility of the character, the mess of him – and that he doesn’t have it figured out at all.”

People were expecting to see a full display of what cannibalism could be … For me the point was more about what was left behind.

Chalamet’s waifish beauty is familiar from films ranging from Beautiful Boy to Dune to Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York, but he isn’t an actor anyone would expect to see in a horror film. The same goes for any of the cast: the Shakespearean Mark Rylance, Guadagnino alumni Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloe Sevigny, even graceful Taylor Russell, despite having the Escape Room franchise in her CV.

Rylance says he had a wave of anxiety in his first eating scene about what he was doing there. “This is me sitting there in my Y-fronts covered in blood and thinking I haven’t eaten liquorice for a long time and it’s really bloody sweet. But I did think ‘am I right being in this film? Is this just going to be some kind of seedy horror film?’ You do think things like that sometimes.”

But seedy horror isn’t Luca Guadagnino’s wheelhouse, either. His Suspiria was more balletic than horrific, a tribute act dedicated to Argento at his most colourfully baroque. When I say Bones and All doesn’t feel like genre, he agrees with relief.

Taylor Russell with Mark Rylance, who sometimes wondered if he should be in Bones and All.Credit:Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

“I’ve always been a big admirer of horror,” he says. “But if I have to think about the horror movies I truly love, they are all something other than just the horror movie they claim to be.” Look at The Exorcist, he says. “It is a family drama. It is a movie that kind of investigates the anxieties of America, trying to get out of Vietnam while bringing that violence into the country. I think the movie is the masterpiece that it is because it makes you think you are getting into a paranormal story but, in fact, you are seeing a story about things that are very close to you and the times in which we live.”

There are no jump scares, no shivery suspense in Bones and All. The punning title may lead you to expect some gross-out humour around excess, but there’s none of that either. “I thought that was a very subversive way to go, to be delicate,” Guadagnino says. “I am always up for a ride in subversiveness. Because movies for me are an instrument to change people’s minds. I want to upside-down people the way I was upside-downed by movies when I was growing up. People were expecting to see a full display of what cannibalism could be put together in a movie scene. For me the point was more about what was left behind. What is this mortal thing that disappears into the eating?”

By existing, these young cannibals are in deficit. They are ruining their world. And there is something true in that to the human experience now.

So while Maren and Sully sink their teeth into the corpse of an old woman called Mrs Harmon, the camera wanders the length of her mantelpiece, alighting on photographs of her family and her holidays. “You see this woman being loved by her family. I lost my dad two years ago and I think about him daily. I like the idea that Maren and Sully are giving free rein to their impulses, we can be given the chance to think and spend some time with who Mrs Harmon was.”

When Maren and Lee find each other, they try to live a better sort of life. They judge themselves, but the story does not judge them. “Can the leopard change its spots? That is the question I asked myself making this movie,” says Guadagnino. “How can they avoid being who they are, these people?”

There is no doubt that this inherent nature is destructive, however. Chalamet suggests that may be true of all of us. “There is an interpretation of this movie that it is about the impossibility of living ethically,” he says. “By existing, these young cannibals are in deficit. They are ruining their world. And there is something true in that to the human experience now. With every toilet you flush, every time you put on the AC, every bottle of water you drink. How to feel good about yourself when perhaps, just by existing, you’re tearing things down? Obviously there’s an element of magical realism in this movie, but I think it’s true of these characters who feel cursed with no possibility of redemption.”

Chalamet and Russell are “eaters” in Bones and All, which won Luca Guadagnino the Silver Lion as best director at the Venice Film Festival.Credit:Yannis Drakoulidis / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

The original book, Russell chips in, made this environmental analogy explicit. “Camille DeAngelis is a vegan. That is a big reason why she wrote the book. It was what was at the forefront of her mind.” That by our very natures, we do harm.

The nature of the cannibals’ lives means they have little to do with other people, but the dusty roads and trailer parks of the red-state heartland are crucial to the film’s atmosphere. “Some of those areas are really intense,” says Chalamet, who had never been there – to Nebraska, Ohio, Kentucky – before. “You can feel the maverick spirit in the air in that part of America, the fierce individualism, the American mentality. To see Luca there, to be captured by him in that setting and to see people who are really disenfranchised existentially, who don’t have a path forward …” he pauses. “Fear felt like a huge undercurrent of this movie.”

Which returns us to The Exorcist and the long reach that a horror film can have. “Certainly for me, the past seven years in America have been quite profoundly and disturbingly interesting,” Guadagnino says. “The fight between the two Americas, the sense of what is the American dream and American possibilities and the crushing of that: these things have become the topic of reflection on contemporary America. I think the movie is almost documentarian in the way we tried to be immersed in the real places and the real facts. And I think you can see in that reality a loneliness that is very strong. These characters are very alone.”

Bones and All opens on November 24.

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