Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met chows down in the first Bones and All trailer

The new romance-cum-road-movie Bones & All rep­re­sents a sig­nif­i­cant plank in the evolv­ing oeu­vre of Luca Guadagni­no, both as the Ital­ian filmmaker’s dar­ing effort to chart the land­scape of the Amer­i­can heart­land and as a sum­ma­tion of his recent pre­oc­cu­pa­tions — the ado­les­cent angst of We Are Who We Are, the high Grand Guig­nol blood­let­ting of Sus­piria, the ten­der long­ing of Call Me By Your Name. Though to the many fans of the lat­est film’s star, it’s Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met​‘s movie and every­one else is just work­ing on it.

The first trail­er for Bones & All arrived this morn­ing, fore­ground­ing a dis­tinc­tive direc­tor reunit­ed with his much-sought-after muse for anoth­er project that sees them both lan­guish­ing in the hazy, hal­cy­on days of sum­mer. Except this time around, Chalamet’s tor­ment­ed not by the homo­sex­u­al­i­ty he doesn’t yet ful­ly under­stand, but by the unslak­able hunger for human flesh.

Tay­lor Rus­sell (who you may remem­ber from Waves) is the real lead here as a fel­low can­ni­bal, on the lam after her appetite lands her in trou­ble with the law and dri­ves away her father (Andre Hol­land). As she makes her way through the Mid­west, she links up with a lone­ly old­ster radi­at­ing unset­tling vibes (Mark Rylance) and a roman­tic oppo­site in Lee (Cha­la­met), whose dyed mul­let and rat­ty over­size jeans mark him as a Gen Z heart­throb despite the ​’80s setting.

LWL’s trusty edi­tor Han­nah Strong was on the case back at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val pre­mière, writ­ing in her round­ly pos­i­tive review that Guadagni­no ​“gets at the fragili­ty and futil­i­ty of human exis­tence, and the fleet­ing moments of joy we find between birth and death.” She’d go on to rule that his lat­est is ​“an imper­fect but effort­less­ly charm­ing film, one that feels lived-in and loved… and speaks to the human desire to love and be loved, in spite of our flaws.”

To the haunt­ing strains of ​“You Want It Dark­er” by Leonard Cohen — anoth­er inter­na­tion­al out­sider who nonethe­less keen­ly cap­tured the spir­it of Amer­i­cana in his work — a pair of young lovers on the run search for a pock­et of the States they can call their own. Will soci­ety ever accept them and their pecu­liar dietary habits? Either way, there will be blood.

Bones and All comes to cin­e­mas in the US on 23 Novem­ber. A date for the UK has yet to be set.