Luca Guadagnino’s cinematic evolution is staggering. Since his Tilda Swinton-starring debut, 1999’s The Protagonists, the Bones and All director has crafted a concise but diverse filmography spanning true crime mockumentary, sexual awakening, sexual trauma, rockstar egos, matriarchal power structures, and of course cannibalism.
In the process, Luca has gone from a director with ideas but without the tools to realise them fully, to an award-winning auteur capable of reducing you to a sobbing ruin. Known for his frequent collaborations with both Tilda and Timothée Chalamet, Luca has ultimately made his career one of portraying desire, love and power in their many forms. From elegant to downright gnarly, he’s consistently been a filmmaker with a singular vision.
Shorts, fashion films and un-vibey documentaries about Italy’s political history aside, here’s a thorough ranking of everything Luca Guadagnino has made so far.
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7. The Protagonists (1999)
Look, there’s really no other place to start here. No film more deserving to be at the bottom of this list. The Protagonists feels not only like a directorial debut (which it is), but also cobbled together. It’s jumbled and jarring from start to finish; the sign of a director who has a grasp on what it is they want to achieve but hasn’t figured out the best route to get there. The film follows a Tilda Swinton-led film crew from Rome to London as they re-create the murder of Mohammed El-Sayed. The result is part-documentary, part-stage production and part-feature, without ever quite succeeding at any of them. Still, every now and then the film grabs your attention with a beautiful scene exploring the many routes through grief.
6. Melissa P. (2005)
Melissa P. aims to tell the story of the sexual awakening of Melissa (María Valverde), a 15-year-old Italian girl. Following a humiliating first sexual encounter with the most popular boy in school, Daniele (Primo Reggiani), Melissa tries to take control of her own pleasure and throws herself deeper into her newfound desire. What starts as this desire for control however, descends into various coercive acts of sexual trauma — including a scene where Melissa is forced to perform oral sex on five classmates. The film leaves you feeling soiled and icky, in part because of what you’re witnessing, but also because of how it is portrayed. Luca employs low lighting and a score that suggests he was aiming for something approaching sensuality, only for it to land somewhere closer to revulsion. It deals with the classic themes of a lot of his work — desire and power dynamics — but handles them without any of the nuance or taste that would come to define the director’s later work.
5. A Bigger Splash (2015)
One of the hardest films to rank, A Bigger Splash is both stunning and staggeringly vexing. In it, the director gracefully depicts a tranquil life in the Mediterranean full of love-making and lounging by the pool; the camera panning across the landscape one minute, capturing tight crops of the characters’ faces the next. Tilda Swinton gives an incredible almost-wordless performance as Marianne, a Bowie-esque singer living with her lover Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) as she recovers her voice. This peaceful existence is thrown into chaos and gradually spirals out of control upon the arrival of Harry (Ralph Fiennes), Marianne’s brash and arrogant former lover and record producer. The film loses its way as it approaches its climax though, when this sensual story becomes an absurd murder thriller. It’s a stylish, strange and frankly sexy film that deserved a better ending.
4. I Am Love (2009)
The first of Luca’s thematic Desire trilogy, I Am Love sees the filmmaker tackle his themes in a far more humanistic and artful way. There’s a purpose here that he had struggled to find in his previous work. Following the aristocratic Recchi family in Milan, the film focuses on Emma (Tilda Swinton), the Russian-born wife of Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), as she begins to place her own needs above those of the traditional family she has married into, but never found herself a part of. She soon embarks on a sensual affair with a chef; her lust in conflict with the idyllic but unhappy life we find her living, something Luca captures with incredibly clarity. It should also be noted that Tilda Swinton learned to speak Italian with a Russian accent for the role and does so flawlessly, which is fucking insane. What an icon.
3. Suspiria (2018)
The themes tackled in Luca’s remake of this 70s cult classic — exploring motherhood and matriarchal power structures — are confronted here with a subtlety rarely seen in horror films. The story follows Susie (Dakota Johnson), an American girl who has enrolled at a Berlin dance academy secretly controlled by a coven of witches. But it’s Tilda Swinton who (as always) steals the show, pulling triple duty as the company’s lead choreographer, an ageing psychotherapist and as the head of the coven. Suspiria is dark, both tonally and aesthetically, and this absence of colour sets it apart from the 1977 original, but also from Luca’s other work, typically bathed in sunshine. Abstract in all of its themes, it’s a horror with no shocks – just a permanent sense of dread.
2. Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Ah, Call Me By Your Name… the film that brought Luca to mainstream stardom and introduced the world to the Guadagnino/Chalamet pairing that has already given us so much. Here, themes of desire, love and loss are told with such grace that the story lingers with you for years: seamlessly transitioning from a tale of innocent love to the grief of when it inevitably ends. There’s a very obvious Armie Hammer-shaped elephant in the room, which does take the shine off the film somewhat, but doesn’t completely take away from the sumptuous work of all parties involved.
1. Bones and All (2022)
The cannibal film you’ve been hearing so much about takes the top spot here, but let’s clear something up… this is not just a cannibal film. Bones and All is a heavenly love story for the ages, truly capturing the essence of what it means to be vulnerable with another person. It’s as grotesque as it is graceful, following Maren (Taylor Russell) and Lee (Timothée Chalamet) as they journey cross-country through America in search for Maren’s mother (Chloë Sevigny), with a career-best performance from Mark Rylance thrown in for good measure. Maren and Lee are ‘eaters’, the Bones parlance for cannibal, and this plays a significant role in their journey, as well as their relationship. But cannibalism is merely a by-product of this masterpiece, a transcendent act of love to share with another. It’s tender and elegant about the eternal human desire to find an equal — the one person we can share all of our intimacies and intricacies with. That companion soul to share every fibre of our being with, bones and all.