This being a film by Luca Guadagnino and once again starring Timothée Chalamet, I thought for sure that this would be a serious drama. So I truly was shocked by the sudden turn to cannibalism. We’ve seen this work already in Raw and thankfully Guadagnino isn’t trying to do quite the same thing. Yet while the production quality here is gorgeous and features great acting, I struggled to find a coherent theme that brings the whole film together while not doubting that Guadagnino does intend for there to be some meaning. In the end, it seems to come down to eating the ones you love and that’s just so banal and shallow.

Maren Yearly is a teenage girl whose father keeps moving her from place to place. When she sneaks out to a slumber party, she chews the flesh off a friend’s finger, revealing her secret and leading her father to hurriedly move them once again. He later abandons her to fend for herself, leaving her an audio cassette detailing her past cannibalistic episodes that she has forgotten about. She decides to travel to search for her mother who she never knew, following the clues in her birth certificate. As she makes her way from state to state across the US, she first encounters an older man named Sully who is a fellow Eater and claims to be able to smell their kind. He leads her to a house where an elderly woman is on the verge of death and they eat her together. When he suggests some kind of long term partnership, Maren decides to run away. She later runs into another Easter closer to her own age named Lee. Though he moves around a lot and seems to survive by killing and eating people and taking their money, he still has some contact with his family. Using a truck stolen from one of his victims, he helps her search for her mother and they seemingly fall in love.

Raw was a fantastic horror film that went all-in about the visceral horror of being uncontrollably hungry for human flesh. This film includes some of that but it also wants to be about this entire underground society of Eaters, say something deep about the link between eating their hunger and love and is a road trip film across the US. It’s just pulling in too many different directions. While it keeps hinting at there being some kind of huge secret behind the Eaters and some deep revelation behind the identity of Maren’s mother, in the end, there’s no payoff. It’s all surface imagery like bloodied mouths and vague insinuations. I’m not even sure what it is Sully wants from Maren as it doesn’t seem to be anything sexual. Guadagnino is either trying to say that even the Eaters are compelled to seek others of their kind out to form some kind of connection to or it’s just a convenient way to put some challenges in Maren’s way. Either way, it’s unsatisfying and uninteresting.

From what I can tell, this film departs from the source material in that the book has the Eaters being compelled to eat those who they experience love and intimacy with. The Eaters in the film simply crave human flesh and are fine with eating complete strangers every once in a while. Needless to say the book version seems much more interesting as Maren and the other Eaters like everyone have the emotional need to connect with others, yet their nature makes them dangerous to those they become close to. I feel that the film does a poor job with developing the romance between Maren and Lee as well as it isn’t at all clear that there is much chemistry between them except that they are of similar age and are both Eaters.

All this means to me that the film is beautiful but nothing of real substance there. It feels to me that Guadagnino was attracted by the juxtaposition of blood and gore with scenes of intimacy but had no real sense how this would work intellectually. As others have pointed out, the author of the novel Camille DeAngelis is a vegan whose work engages with the morality of eating any meat at all. This subtlety too seems lost in the film. Raw remains by far the superior film about cannibalism while this one completely misses the mark.