Venice: A Creepy ‘Call Me by Your Name’ Reunion in ‘Bones and All’

VENICE — There is a message that social scientists and environmental watchdogs have been trying to convey in this newspaper for a while. But maybe you haven’t really been listening. Maybe it will take a different messenger to catch your attention.

“I think societal collapse is in the air,” Timothée Chalamet said on Friday at the Venice Film Festival.

Though you might expect Chalamet to issue a doomy quote like that while promoting “Dune,” in which his character presides over the destruction of an empire, the 26-year-old actor tossed it out during a news conference for “Bones and All,” a new film that reunites him with Luca Guadagnino, the director of Chalamet’s breakout vehicle “Call Me by Your Name.”

But then again, discussing “Bones and All” can put a person in a more contemplative frame of mind: Though it’s a romance — Chalamet plays one of two drifters, traveling together across the Midwest in search of belonging — the movie is stark, lonely and more than a bit gory because our two lovers happen to be cannibals.

(Maybe now you understand why this meaty film is coming out Thanksgiving week.)

Adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis, “Bones and All” tracks Maren (“Waves” star Taylor Russell), an 18-year-old who has just transferred to a new high school where she tentatively befriends a classmate and then, somewhat less tentatively, bites down hard on the girl’s finger. Maren’s dad (André Holland) has been dreading this sort of thing, as she’s shown an inclination toward consuming human flesh ever since she was a child. So when her father speeds her out of town and abandons her in the middle of nowhere, Maren must finally seek guidance from her own kind.

Fortunately, she can smell fellow cannibals, including Chalamet’s Lee, who she forges a tender romance with, and Mark Rylance, who plays a veteran cannibal with unnerving Harry Dean Stanton energy. There’s even a scene where Maren and Lee run into a cannibal drifter played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who was so sweet in “Call Me by Your Name” and here is something else entirely.

“It was a delight, the idea that we could kind of summon Michael to be the perverted father after having been the loving father in ‘Call Me by Your Name,’” Guadagnino said at the news conference. But if people on social media are tempted to draw a link from “Bones and All” to another “Call Me by Your Name” actor — Armie Hammer, whose career fell apart when the star’s cannibalistic fantasies came to light and sexual assault allegations followed — Guadagnino would rather you didn’t.

“The relationship between this kind of digital muckraking and our wish to make this movie is nonexistent, and it should be met with a shrug,” Guadagnino told Deadline last week. “I would prefer to talk about what the film has to say, rather than things that have nothing to do with it.”

Social media was a hot topic at the film’s news conference: Though the film is set in the 1980s, one journalist felt that the outcast characters in “Bones and All” suffer society’s judgment in a way that could be likened to a modern-day pile-on.

“To be young now, or to be young whenever — I can only speak for my generation — is to be intensely judged,” Chalamet said. “It was a relief to play characters that are wrestling with an internal dilemma absent the ability to go on Reddit or Twitter, Instagram or TikTok and figure out where they fit in.”

Added his co-star Russell, “The hope is really that you can find your own compass within all of [social media], and that seems like a difficult task now.”

Chalamet concurred. “I think it’s tough to be alive now,” he said before issuing his prediction of societal collapse. What made him so certain? “It smells like it,” he said, as Lee or Maren might.

But Chalamet wasn’t totally without hope. He said “Bones and All” portrayed that disenfranchisement and tribelessness in a way that could prove helpful now.

“Without being pretentious, that’s why hopefully these movies matter,” Chalamet said. “The role of the artist is to shine a light on what’s going on.”