★★★★ There are many echoes in this movie: The Honeymoon Killers, Badlands, Let Me In and others. Road movies the first two in which two murderous lovers travel through the deep US. The third is the love story of a vampire and a teenager. In this case, “vampirism” is cannibalism. The film is a love story, yes, and a horror story, too, accomplished on both counts. What is interesting is the idea of a society that eats itself, that devours its children or turns them into devourers. It is true that this metaphor is also the first thing that comes to us and, if we think about it a little, it is still trivial. But at the same time, there is something else: fiction itself and its rules, which work in a universe that seems to lack law and society (those towns, those fields seem like the rest of a civilization after the end of the world) take on an entity own hallucinatory We forget symbolism, allegory, and metaphor to focus exclusively on what happens to those creatures. Incidentally, the return of those films in which our empathy -or sympathy- turns towards criminals, always marginalized and desperate who only live according to their own rules, is still interesting. Guadagnino, a great portraitist of contemporary youth, achieves something rare: an original and “seventies” film in the best (and most cinephile) sense of the term.
