Guadagnino, having indulged in a flawed but interesting 2018 remake of the classic 1970s giallo film Suspiria, about a witches’ coven in a ballet school, wades deeper into gore with Bones and All, which, like Call Me By Your Name, is based on a novel of the same name, this time by Camille DeAngelis. There are other similarities, too: the 1980s setting, the doomed romance. The lead character is Maren Yearly (Taylor Russell), a young woman still in high school when the film begins, whose intermittently controlled cannibalistic impulse has condemned her and her father to a marginal and peripatetic life in shotgun shacks across the United States. They show up somewhere, Maren’s appetite sooner or later gets the better of her, the pair flee again. Her father – a small role played with sympathy by André Holland – has been her protector and enabler, but everybody has their limits. After another of Maren’s transgressions, he abandons her, with vague instructions that she seek her long-departed mother, who may hold the clue to the daughter’s aberrancy.

(L to R) Taylor Russell as Maren and Mark Rylance as Sully in Bones and All, directed by Luca Guadagnino

And so a road trip gets underway, allowing Guadagnino to incorporate every motif of American cinema he can think of, and several I wish that he hadn’t. It’s all here: the dead-end as visual metaphor, the creepy rednecks, bus stations, gas stations, tail lights disappearing into the darkness, and golden hour trysts. But at least Badlands (1973), the obvious model for this film, had a point to make about American life – about who, and what, it discards. Bones and All is merely clichés in search of a purpose. The 1980s setting provides an excuse for period props (a walkman, a record player, oversized knitted sweaters) and moody period pop songs, but Guadagnino does not illuminate, or elucidate, his characters’ behaviour with reference to that time. One doesn’t have to strain to make thematic connections between cannibalism and the economic ruination of small-town America during the 1980s, but whereas Guadagnino’s Suspiria was crammed with analogies, this film is bereft of them. Bones and All is bloody but not shocking in any meaningful sense; the only thing it made me feel was mildly nauseated.

All this said, it’s just about worth watching for Russell’s performance, which, until the weak script gets the better of her at the conclusion, is finely judged. Her struggle with what appears to be an inherited condition is the conflict that drives the film along; she is by turns dangerous, helpless, and revolted by her own behaviour. Mark Rylance has a memorable role as a kind of cannibal elder, finding dignity in the plight of a character forced by their desires to live outside of any community. But again, by the conclusion, it all gets a bit ridiculous, real heavy-breathing psycho-killer telemovie territory, as if the premise wasn’t rich enough.

It’s Chalamet as Maren’s young lover Lee who is the weakest link: he poses rather than acts. Unfortunately, his director is too enamoured of his face to require him to do otherwise. The history of cinema is the history of performers whose unusual degree of beauty was best worshipped by the camera. In certain films, with certain actors, that beauty is enough to contemplate, but not here. I had the sense that Chalamet was turning away from the lens as much as he could, when he could, to hide himself – and when he couldn’t, to let his looks be a carapace protecting an interiority he’s learnt not to reveal anymore. That’s a shame, but I don’t blame him.

Bones and All (Universal Pictures), 130 min, in cinemas on 24 November 2022.