Timothée Chalamet Is a Cannibalistic Serial Killer Looking for Love in the Bones and All Trailer

Since his breakout role as Elio Perlman in Luca Guadagnino’s 2017 drama Call Me by Your Name, Timothée Chalamet has graced the big screen as the charming boy next door, an epic sci-fi warrior and even a 15th century English king. Now, the 26-year-old star has rejoined forces with Guadagnino and is taking his shot at Lee, the cannibalistic serial killer at the center of Bones and All.

Set to Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker,” the new Bones and All trailer depicts Lee and his similarly-hungry lover Maren (Taylor Russell) on a pastel road trip through late 1980s America. The trailer blends sun-kissed images of realist horror and young romance, configuring itself through quick-paced crosscuttings between brutal murder sequences and vehement declarations of love. One moment, we see Lee and Maren share a kiss. The next, we watch them carry a kicking victim into a restroom. Flashing right after the other: Images of a man being suffocated with a plastic bag; gorgeous backdrops of peaceful American plains; blood splatter; passionate embraces.

“You don’t think I’m a bad person?” Lee questions over an image of him slicing someone’s throat in a cornfield. “All I think is that I love you,” Maren assures him. In this preview, brutality and eroticism intertwine indefinitely. Carnage and carnal pleasure become one.

Watch it here:

The eerie trailer debuts amidst a wave of controversy surrounding the story of real-life cannibal and serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, the subject of Netflix’s latest limited series Dahmer—Monster: the Jeffrey Dahmer Story. The series has rekindled complicated conversations surrounding Hollywood’s obsession with serial killers and audiences’ unhealthy appetite for exploitative content that packages and sells the trauma of others under the label of “true crime.” Although Bones and All is sourced from a 2015 novel of the same title and not from true events, its young, sweet-faced killers and interest in love could possibly place the film in rough waters. Will audiences find that Guadagnino’s coming-of-age tale romanticizes its killers? And if they do, will this romanticization cause the same uproar as the Ryan Murphy work, considering the film is a work of fiction and not based upon a real-life monster? I suppose we’ll have to wait for November to find out.

Bones and All also stars Mark Rylance, Chloë Sevigny and Michael Stuhlbarg. The film arrives in theaters November 23, 2022.

Kathy Michelle Chacón is a Gen-Z writer, academic and filmmaker based in sunny California. When she’s not writing for Paste, Film Cred or Kathychacon.com, you can find her eating pupusas, cuddling with her dog Strawberry or sweating her face off somewhere in the Inland Empire.