The cannibal love story is bloody – and beautiful

And this is where we thought the “Call Me By Your Name” peach was controversial.

In the latest love film by director Luca Guadagnino, again with Timothée Chalamet in the leading role, there are no juicy summer fruits on the menu – but bloody human flesh. Yes, Bones and All is a surprisingly effective and moving cannibal love story.

You giggle – or grimace – at the premise, but it really works in an artful, poetic, and adorable way.

Based on the novel by Camille DeAngelis, the film cleverly avoids a serial killer or criminal (despite being crimes) vibe by making its characters’ perversion almost supernatural. Their homo sapiens appetite for cows, we learn, is a genetic, incurable trait, and they exist covertly on the periphery, like vampires.

Maren (Taylor Russell) finds that she can’t contain her thirst for blood after, uh, an accident at a sleepover and runs away from her father’s house in Virginia. During a stop on a bus bound for Maryland, she meets Sully, a creepy cannibal played by Mark Rylance, who teaches her the ropes and tells her, “I never eat a eater.”

Fearing for her life, she sets out from there and soon after meets Lee (Chalamet) at a drug store. It’s a killer meets sweet. He’s another eater, and this is the only story in existence where discovering that a hottie is a cannibal isn’t a red flag. They are sadistic soul mates.

Lee and Maren embark on a road trip across America, satisfying their cravings and then moving on to the next state, partly in search of Maren’s long-lost mother. This is where Guadagnino’s visual mastery comes in. The director captures the heartland with fresh, admiring, childlike eyes, much like fellow Italian Sergio Leone found a new vibrancy in the desert mountains and sunsets in Once Upon a Time in the West.

Convenience stores, county fairs and, well, Minnesota have never been so eye-catching.

Meanwhile, Chalamet – as the dark, rebellious Waif – and Russell – playing an outwardly innocent but cutthroat survivor – develop a believable, all-consuming infatuation on their characters’ journey, littered with treacherous Ne’er Do Wells. “Bones” with its unusual mix of emo-kid googly eyes and campfire Americana is “Twilight” meets Mark Twain.

Both actors somehow turn young killers into deeply understandable misfits. At face value, they are monsters who should be slandered by society. And yet we are utterly helpless in our affection for them. We only want the best for these CANNIBALS.

Be warned that eating fellow human beings for brunch will be cruelly portrayed and not shy. There’s an air of horror to these scenes, as do Rylance’s Pennywise the Dancing clown-esque performances as Sully.

But even with the blood, as Guadagnino sees it, there is beauty in these beasts.