131 min | R | November 18, 2022 | United Artists Releasing
Maren eats people. So does the drifter she falls for. Luca Guadagnino films their hunger as a love story and a road trip across Reagan-era America, and the cannibalism turns out to be the easy part.
Maren is a teenage girl with a compulsion she cannot control. She eats human flesh. Her father abandons her on her eighteenth birthday with a cassette tape of explanation and a stack of cash, and she sets out across the country to find the mother she never knew. On the road she meets Lee, a young man who shares her appetite and her isolation. The film uses cannibalism as a literal hunger and a metaphor for every appetite that makes a person unfit for ordinary life. It is a film about being born wrong and learning to live with the people who are wrong in the same way.
Taylor Russell plays Maren with watchfulness and restraint. She makes hunger look like grief. Russell holds the camera through long silences and lets shame do the work that dialogue would ruin. Timothée Chalamet plays Lee with a bruised swagger that keeps cracking open to reveal the frightened kid underneath. Mark Rylance plays Sully, an older eater who tracks Maren with a soft voice and a braid of hair, and he turns courtesy into something obscene. The performances refuse to treat the eaters as monsters and instead treat them as addicts who have made peace with what they are.
Luca Guadagnino directs from a screenplay by David Kajganich, adapting the Camille DeAngelis novel into a portrait of the American interior. The cinematography by Arseni Khachaturov shoots the Midwest in faded amber light and empty fields that make the violence feel small against the landscape. The kills happen in dim rooms and roadside dark, and the camera lingers on the aftermath rather than the act. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score the film with a tenderness that works against the horror and keeps pulling the story back toward romance. The production design buries the late 1980s in thrift-store clothes and rusted cars without ever announcing the period.
The film commits fully to its premise and trusts the audience to find the love story inside the gore. Guadagnino is more interested in loneliness than in shock. The eaters of the title are people who can never sit at a normal table, and the film locates real feeling in their exile. The closing movement reaches for a grand romantic statement and lands it without fully earning the scale. This is a beautiful and unsettling film that says less than it believes it does.