Bones & All: Everything We Know About Timothée Chalamet’s Cannibal Flick

Director Luca Guadagnino’s new film Bones and All reunites him with his Call Me By Your Name muse. Timothée Chalamet. Though, this time around it’s a completely different type love story. This film is also an adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’s novel of the same name that follows two teens in love—and they both just happen to be cannibals. Chalamet’s romantic interest is played by Taylor Russell, and in the first full-length trailer released on September 29, their characters, Lee and Maren, are clearly head over heels. (Side note: They also have incredible hair.) Their love story is intercut with harrowing shots of Lee scraping blood out from his finger nails, hitting someone with a crow bar, and some general haunting roadside horror. Clearly, this film—not to mention just the trailer—isn’t for the faint of heart.

“You don’t think I’m a bad person?” Lee asks Maren after we see them violently injure and murder several people. “All I think is that I love you,” she responds. Sounds like they’re made for each other!

Here, the answers to all your questions about Timothée’s goriest project—which won the Silver Lion for best direction at this year’s Venice Film Festival—yet.

What is Bones and All about?

The film is described as “a story of first love between Maren, a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee, an intense and disenfranchised drifter, as they meet and join together for a 1,000-mile odyssey that takes them through the back roads, hidden passages, and trap doors of Ronald Reagan’s America. But, despite their best efforts, all roads lead back to their terrifying pasts and to a final stand that will determine whether their love can survive their otherness.”

Guadagnino himself has said, “"a very romantic story, about the impossibility of love and yet, the need for it. Even in extreme circumstances."

And there’s cannibalism.

Maren has been eating people since she was young, but after her mother goes missing one day she set out both to find her father and to meet other cannibals like her.

Who is in the cast of Bones and All?

Alongside Chalamet and Russell, the supporting cast includes Chloë Sevigny, Mark Rylance, André Holland, and Michael Stuhlbarg. Stuhlbarg played the father of Chalamet’s character in Call Me By Your Name.

What’s Armie Hammer got to do with all this?

Oh, how Guadagnino wishes you wouldn’t ask. The director has been barraged with questions about the connection between the film’s plot and the fact that Chalamet’s Call Me By Your Name costar has been accused of cannibalistic tendencies IRL. By this August, a full three months ahead of the movie’s wide release, Guadagnino made it clear that he’s had enough.

“It didn’t dawn on me. I realized this afterward when I started to be told of some of these innuendos on social media,” the director told Deadline about the connection. “This project—which was a popular book—had been in development for a number of years before Dave Kajganich brought it to me in 2020. Any link with anything else exists only in the realm of social media, with which I do not engage. The relationship between this kind of digital muckraking and our wish to make this movie is nonexistent and it should be met with a shrug. I would prefer to talk about what the film has to say, rather than things that have nothing to do with it.”

Where was Bones and All filmed?

Most of Guadagnino’s films are set in historic European cities, but for Bones and All he shot in and around Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s the first time Guadagnino has ever filmed a feature in the United States.

When will Bones and All be released?

The thriller is scheduled to premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, but will be in theaters on November 23.