Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet in Bones and All (Yannis Drakoulidis/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures)

In the raw and bold Bones and All, with the subject of cannibalism at its center, Italian director Luca Guadagnino continues his tantalizing work in the United States. This time he adapts the novel by Camille DeAngelis about two young “eaters,” as they are called here, and explores their dangerous nature while they savor a shared freedom. By focusing on these loners during the 1980s, the film provides a rare look at life on the periphery in Reagan’s America.

Frank Yearly (André Holland) is an overprotective father regarding his teenage daughter’s behavior. Maren (Taylor Russell in a star-making performance) seems well-behaved and compliant, but isn’t it natural for some rebellion against authority at her age? It’s not surprising then that she escapes in the middle of the night to attend a sleepover with girls her own age. Unfortunately, while sharing a possibly sexually charged moment with perhaps her only companion, Maren lets herself go, giving into her true nature and devouring her friend’s finger, chewing it to the bone. This horrific image is an appetizer of what’s to come, a long-winded parade of macabre sensuality.

Meanwhile, Maren’s imprudence appears to be the last of a series of situations that have left Frank exhausted and willing to abandon his daughter, which he does, though leaving behind her birth certificate and a cassette disclosing her history. (His voice recording guides us throughout the film.) She now has enough clues to initiate a journey to find her lost mother, and for the first time in her life, Maren is completely free to discover what it means to be an eater. Her first encounter with another member of her kind, a solitary man named Sully (Mark Rylance in an extravagant performance), allows her to learn lessons about feeding her hunger without attracting attention and how to recognize other eaters through smell. She also gets a glimpse of how lonely life it can be.

A community among them is impossible due to the lack of trust—Who will eat whom?—even if Sully initially pretends to adopt Maren. Sensing danger, she runs away from this would-be mentor to track down her mother. There’s no other fate but loneliness until she met Lee (Timothée Chalamet), another young eater whose disarming tenderness awakes a new attraction to her senses, and not precisely carnivorous. Lee’s apparent frailty is deceptive to his victims: He’s lethal and ruthless as a hunter. (Guadagnino is probably the director who knows best how to exploit the star’s sex appeal while pushing his talent as an actor.) As soon as he corresponds to her feelings, Bones and All is no longer just a bloody, elevated horror movie but also a burning romance, enhanced by the charisma and beauty of both actors.

Maren and Lee embark on a sinuous adventure into Middle America, and their road trip benefits from Guadagnino’s keen perspective that notices details about the countryside that other filmmaker may overlook (impoverished regions, elderly abandoned in solitary houses). Along the way, the couple crisscross with potential victims (like a closeted gay man seduced by Lee) and other eaters. One menacing eater (Michael Stuhlbarg) posits that Maren and Lee haven’t fully accepted their nature until they have tasted “bones and all.”

David Kajganich’s screenplay is never shy to portray the characters as social threats. When Maren devours her first full corpse, guided by Sully, the camera pans over the house of the victim they are devouring, revealing photos of a life that didn’t deserve such end. This is one reason why Guadagnino is one of the most exciting directors working right now. His new movie takes advantage of his best impulses in horror and romance alike, closing the abyss between Call Me by Your Name and Suspiria without repeating himself.

Bones and All seems to pursue shock value at first, only to later question if there’s a place for love in this world of monsters. A tragic answer awaits, but exuberance is never sacrificed (via the bucolic cinematography by Arseni Khachaturan). As a cannibal love story, the film fulfills the deepest and darkest desires of its premise, so maybe another interpretation of it is as the distorted reflection of every edgy young adult novel ever adapted for the screen. More than any of those films, the urgent and poignant romanticism of Bones and All embraces the primal notion that love and lust inevitably start with the flesh.