Romance as Cannibalism: An Autopsy of the Genre

 

I enjoy romantic movies without the slightest bit of shame. I’m that hopeless romantic who defended Celine Song’s

The Materialists when social media was crucifying me for calling it one of the year’s great masterpieces. The same guy who claimed Sean Baker’s Anora would be legendary long before Mikey Madison became the new “method goddess” for her portrayal of Anora Mikheeva. But here’s the revelation nobody wants to chew on: for contemporary cinematic romance to work, it has to operate exactly like modern horror. Both genres demand that rules exist to be broken, preferably with surgical tools and zero anesthesia.

Anora didn’t play the safe Pretty Woman game; it turned into a scalpel that slices open sexual capitalism without emotional condoms. The Materialists didn’t follow Nora Ephron’s pink playbook either; it performed a vivisection of love in the age of dating algorithms and Zoom therapy, to the point of being accused of propaganda for “broken men.” These films understand something Hollywood denied for decades: authentic romance has always been emotional cannibalism. The difference is that now we can admit it without self-help metaphors.

Luca Guadagnino got it when he gave us Bones and All in 2022. The premise is as brutal as it is honest: two teenagers in love who end up devouring each other, literally and figuratively, in Reagan-era America. It’s no coincidence that Guadagnino set this story when the American Dream began consuming itself like a capitalist ouroboros. Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet star in a cannibalistic Badlands, where every stop includes fresh viscera and teen existentialism served rare. It’s Natural Born Killers filtered through the sensibility of Call Me By Your Name, as if Oliver Stone had grown up reading Poppy Z. Brite instead of Hunter S. Thompson.

The film operates as if Jennifer Lynch had directed Twilight after overdosing on true crime podcasts and philosophical amphetamines. Russell delivers a performance that transcends body horror to plunge into pure soul horror, dragging her paternal abandonment like someone carrying a permanently decaying corpse. She navigates a Reagan-promised prosperous America while scavenging for her next human meal at abandoned truck stops. Each encounter with other “eaters” feels like group therapy in a capitalist purgatory, where consumption becomes obscenely literal. It’s pure support group directed by Hannibal Lecter.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross compose a soundtrack that sounds like Joy Division surviving to discover industrial metal in a post-apocalyptic America. The result outdoes any depressive Lana Del Rey playlist in terms of existential melancholy, and that takes Black Dahlia-level surgical talent. The music acts as morphine for the soul while you witness atrocities, creating the cognitive dissonance that defines generational trauma. At times, it evokes the devastating universe of Larry Clark’s legendary Kids, but Guadagnino never lets you forget his debt to the visceral body horror of Julia Ducournau’s brilliant Raw.

Guadagnino proves why Bones and All eclipses both his pretentious Suspiria remake and his recent, failed Queer. While Suspiria got lost in Dario Argento-esque visual masturbation and Queer drowned in undergrad literary references, Bones and All finds that impossible balance between visceral and tender that defines memorable cinema. It doesn’t reach the obsessive perfection of Challengers—that erotic tennis symphony that redefined the modern love triangle—but it surpasses them because it understands a fundamental truth: true love always required consuming the other down to the bones.

The Italian delivers a film that feels like Gaspar Noé adapting a Cormac McCarthy novel while looping Godspeed You! Black Emperor during a bad trip. It’s Romeo and Juliet reimagined by Clive Barker, with the emotional budget of Requiem for a Dream and the narrative delicacy of There Will Be Blood. Maren’s maternal quest becomes an American odyssey that would make Jack Kerouac weep, assuming Kerouac had cannibalistic tendencies and a TikTok addiction. Ethel Cain must be dying of envy from her Southern Gothic aesthetic.

I don’t know if Guadagnino will ever top Bones and All. Recreating a work that blends romance, drama, and horror with this mastery isn’t a task for mortals. His work on this film, in particular, positions him as the rightful heir, in equal parts, to the visual exploits of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, John Cassavetes, and David Cronenberg, though his earlier and later works make it clear that boxing in his talent is like trying to tame a wolf: possible in theory, disastrous in practice. And perhaps that’s the lesson: the best art, like the best love, always ends up devouring you.