The film is only loosely based on its source material, a young adult novel by Camille DeAngelis. Her performance here is captivating: in playing a late-teen girl with a dark secret who is feeling her way into living alone and fending for herself, she seems to mirror that exploration by sensitively feeling her way into her character, giving Maren’s gradual awakening extra resonance. Set in the Reaganite 1980s, the film gives Taylor Russell another chance to shine after her breakout role in Trey Shults’ Waves. It’s not just the presence of Chalamet, surfing in on Dune’s sandwaves, that will push the R-rated Bones and All over the bump in the box-office road represented by its often gory content, but its serious, clear-eyed sympathy with its young protagonists, and its celebration – channeled through golden-hour photography and an edgy country guitar soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – of the potent American myth of the romantic drifter. Otherwise, there’s not a hint of comedy here, not even of the dark variety. The one joke in a film that takes the comma out of “Let’s eat, people!” is its planned US release date: 23 November, one day before Thanksgiving. Pairing rising talent Taylor Russell and risen star Timothee Chalamet in the roles of two misfits drifting across the American Midwest trying to make sense of what they are while quietly falling in love, Bones and All is essentially a romantic road movie Western a horror-tinged Bonnie and Clyde or Badlands in which frontiers are as much ethical and emotional as they are to do with purple hills on the horizon. But Guadagnino’s seventh feature is unlikely to remind most viewers of that, or any of the other hybrid horror dramas that have come our way since Let the Right One In. It’s true that Palme d’Or winning French director Julie Ducournau did something similar in her 2016 debut, Raw.

The one joke in a film that takes the comma out of “Let’s eat, people!” is its planned US release date: 23 November, one day before Thanksgiving

The Italian director has always liked to range from genre to drama and back again and, in his third collaboration with screenwriter David Kajganich (after A Bigger Splash and Suspiria), he pulls off the tricky task of smearing a tender story of a young girl’s search for love and guidance in blood, skin, cartilage and viscera so fresh we can practically taste them. If anyone is going to make a cannibal coming of age story work, it’s Luca Guadagnino.

Bones and all novel