Timothée Chalamet’s New Cannibal Romance Movie Teaser Is So Intense

Timothée Chalamet first hit it big in 2017 as a lovestruck teenager in the coming-of-age film Call Me by Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnino. The movie earned him his first Best Actor nomination at the Oscars, and since then, fans have waited to see if Chalamet and Guadagnino would reunite for another project. That’s finally happening with a 1980s-period piece called Bones & All. The new film is headed to the film festival circuit and... it is a doozy of a concept.

Based on the 2015 novel by Camille DeAngelis, Bones & All is the story of teenage love... and cannibalism. A meditation on self-esteem and feminism (not to mention the moral quandaries involved with having a taste for human flesh), the book took home a 2016 Alex Award for “adult books that appeal to teens.” The film is billed as “a horror-love story,” and when it was first announced at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival as a package, it got the attention of a lot of movie studios.

The film was eventually picked up by MGM and is slated to make its debut at the 2022 Venice Film Festival before opening in the U.S and worldwide later in 2022. Here’s everything to know about the film so far.

Bones & All Trailer

The first teaser for Bones & All was hinted at by Chalamet on his Twitter account a day before its release, with T\tweets reading “Soft Bones,” “Crunchy Bones,” and “Boney Bones.” Finally, on Aug. 11, 2022, the 40-second teaser arrived.

Audiences can probably expect a full-length trailer to follow around the time the film opens in Venice in early September 2022.

Bones & All Cast

Chalamet has been attached to the project since it was first announced in January 2021, with Luca Guadagnino slated to direct the film. Taylor Russell (Lost in Space) will play Maren, the main character from the book.

As filming got underway in June 2021 and the film’s first photo was released, Deadline confirmed the rest of the film’s lineup. The cast includes Mark Rylance (Dunkirk), André Holland (Moonlight), Jessica Harper (Suspiria), Michael Stuhlbarg (The Shape of Water), David Gordon-Green (Halloween), Francesca Scorsese (We Are Who We Are), and Chloë Sevigny (Zodiac). As filming continued, Anna Cobb was also cast in a significant role, as was Jake Horowitz.

Bones & All Plot

In March 2022, as MGM picked up the finished project for distribution, the film released the official synopsis:

The movie is a story of first love between Maren (Russell), a young woman learning how to survive on the margins of society, and Lee (Chalamet), an intense and disenfranchised drifter, as they meet and join together for a thousand-mile odyssey which 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.

Despite Bones & All being based on a work of fiction, it’s nearly impossible to not draw connections between this project and the very real Hollywood controversy of Chalamet and Guadagnino’s fellow Call Me By Your Name collaborator, Armie Hammer. In early 2021, several of Hammer’s former partners made sexual assault allegations against him, also suggesting he had a fetish for cannibalism and blood-drinking.

Hammer has repeatedly denied these allegations via his lawyers, and neither Chalamet nor Guadagnino have spoken publicly about the controversy. But when Bones & All was first reported to be in production, Hammer’s ex-wife, Elizabeth Chambers, sure did. According to Nylon, Chambers posted a comment on Just Jared’s Instagram about the “cannibal love story” film, writing “No. Words.” Fast-forward to August 2022, when the teaser release for Bones & All coincided with the trailer release for a new docuseries about Hammer — their paths just seem to keep crossing.

Bones & All Premiere Date

After playing the festival circuit, Bones & All will premiere in theaters just in time for the holiday season on Nov. 23, 2022.