Director Luca Guadagnino gave us Call Me By Your Name, which was good, but highly overrated. Now he’s giving us another love story that will also disturb a few folks. Let me start by saying, there will be NO SPOILERS in this review. Almost every other critic reviewing this movie has given stuff away. All you really need to know is that it’s a coming-of-age romance, with two young folks traveling from town to town. Oh, and it’s got some gory horror elements, so if you get queasy easy, it’s probably not for you.
Guadagnino brought back Timothy Chalamet to play Lee. He meets up with Maren (Taylor Russell). When we first meet her, we can sense she doesn’t have the best home life. When her dad (Andre Holland) picks her up from school, he seems like a gentle soul (the kind of character he played in Moonlight). Yet Maren doesn’t hang around with him for long.
This is all based on the Camille DeAngelis novel from 2015, in a story that takes place in the ‘80s, which explains why the girls are listening to Duran Duran at the sleepover, and we see Rudy Guiliani (with hair) on the TV. The scene with girls polishing nails…is one of the most shocking scenes I’ve seen on screen in 20 years.
Once Lee and Maren hook up, we meet some creepy characters along the way. Director David Gordon Green is especially weird. Michael Stuhlbarg (one of the most underrated actors around, who played Chalamet’s dad in Call Me By Your Name), plays against type, looking and acting like Meatloaf meets a mountain man from Deliverance. No indie picture would be complete without Chloe Sevigny, and she has a great scene. My favorite though is Mark Rylance, who is in one of my favorite movies of this year – The Outfit. Here, he plays a creepy guy that seems to keep showing up. Maren seems to suspect he’s up to no good, and so does the audience. Rylance really chews the scenery in every scene.
It’s surprising that the romance works so well. They have great chemistry. My wife said at one point, “If this didn’t have all the blood, I would think it’s a YA novel.”
I’ve gotten burned out with actors singing along to songs on the radio while driving, but watching Lee get excited about Kiss’ “Lick It Up” and rocking out to it…is an awful lot of fun.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross provide background music for the film (who better than the guys in Nine Inch Nails that once sang “I want to **** you like an animal!).
This movie might be an acquired taste for some. It will be disturbing, much the way Midsommar was. But my wife and I talked about it for a week straight after seeing it (and each time, she begged me not to bring it up anymore, as she was so freaked out by it).
It does give you a lot to chew on, and I like it the more I think about it. It could be slow at times, but I was never bored. I did get annoyed early on with the shaky camera.
3 ½ stars out of 5.