‘Queer’ movie review: Daniel Craig is sublime in Luca Guadagnino’s woozy psychedelia

Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is a film of obsessions — some sublime, others grotesque, but all simmering under the sweltering heat of a Mexico City that feels at once intoxicatingly free and claustrophobically doomed. Adapted from William S. Burroughs’ long-suppressed second novel, the Italian auteur’s follow-up to last year’s Challengers, is less concerned with the plot of its source material than with the sensation of unrequited longing.

Freed from the rigid constraints of 007, lead star Daniel Craig gives a performance so loose and lived-in that it feels almost dangerous, as though his William Lee (the film’s stand-in for Burroughs) might unravel entirely before our eyes. His Lee is a tremor in human form — sunken eyes, nicotine-stained fingers, an unplaceable hunger. The washed-out, heroin-addled expatriate drinks with the kind of abandon that suggests he quite enjoys anaesthetising his own existence. With his rumpled white linen suits, perpetually squinting gaze, and a sidearm that he carries with an almost laughable bravado, Lee is both a tragic and ridiculous man, convinced of his own suavity, yet increasingly aware that he is merely an embarrassment.

Queer (English)

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Omar Apollo, Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville

Runtime: 137 minutes

Storyline: Lee, a solitary American in Mexico City, falls for a beautiful, elusive former soldier. Journeying together into the jungle, Lee sees, for the first time, the possibility of an intimate and infinite love

Drew Starkey plays his hot new obsession, Eugene Allerton, with a cool Calvin Klein model-like detachment that drives men like Lee to madness. He is young, beautiful, and inscrutable, and from the moment Lee spots him at a cockfight — the sensualist in Guadagnino shoots it in slow motion — he is undone. Theirs is not so much a romance as it is an experiment in emotional sadomasochism. Lee is desperate for scraps of affection, and Eugene, withholding just enough to keep him on the hook.

Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig in a still from ‘Queer’

Drew Starkey and Daniel Craig in a still from ‘Queer’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI

Having built a career out of exploring desire in its many permutations, Guadagnino directs with his usual tactile exuberance. His Mexico City is a city of heat, sweat, and longing, a place where queer desire is a curse, but also a means of liberation. The bars are grimy, the men half-lit in the neon haze of cheap cantinas, and yet there is an undeniable romance to the decadently decaying world. 

The soundtrack is peppered with anachronistic needle drops from Nirvana and New Order, that pair with the dreamy textures of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s follow-up collaboration with Guadagnino since last summer’s Challengers.

Guadagnino releases all his inhibitions for all the film’s sex. Lee and Eugene’s encounters are fevered and fumbling, charged with a painful desperation. There’s also an unflinching look at the obvious imbalance of their relationship — Lee may be the elder, but Eugene wields all the power. Even when Eugene allows himself to be seduced, it is with the bemused detachment of indulging a passing curiosity rather than surrendering to desire. Starkey plays him with a maddening opacity, a sphinx-like presence that Lee can neither decode nor possess.

The film’s second half shifts gears as Lee drags Eugene to South America in search of yagé, the hallucinogenic plant Burroughs himself once believed could unlock the secrets of human consciousness — what we now know more popularly as one of the strongest psychedelics on the planet, ayahuasca. Guadagnino takes the film from here into a wilder, more fever-dream territory, abandoning the woozy romance of Mexico City for something more primal. Lesley Manville, unrecognisable and feral, appears as a botanist with the air of having spent too much time in the jungle and too little in the company of the sane. The yagé sequences are a marvel of body horror and psychedelic delirium, pushing Guadagnino’s aesthetic into new, grotesque visual grammar.

Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey and Lesley Manville in a still from ‘Queer’

Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey and Lesley Manville in a still from ‘Queer’
| Photo Credit:
MUBI

But at the core of it, Queer remains a story of self-destruction as a form of devotion. Lee is an artist in the making, but his artistry is not in his writing (which he barely seems to do) but in his ability to shape his life into a grand, tragic farce. He loves Eugene with a blind, bruising intensity that can only lead to disaster, and Craig plays his unravelling with a mix of arrogance and abjection that is nothing short of mesmerising.

For all his flourishes, Guadagnino does not romanticise Lee’s predicament. He allows us to see him for what he is: not a doomed lover but a man addicted, not just to heroin but to his own suffering. The tragedy of Queer is not that Eugene doesn’t love him back. It’s that for all his wit and bravado, Lee will never understand why. Guadagnino has always understood that desire in its purest form is a little grotesque, and Queer leans into that discomfort. It lingers in the spaces between touch, in the desperate reach for a connection that slips through fingers like cigarette smoke.

If there’s one thing Hollywood loves more than nostalgia, it’s predictability, and neither of Guadagnino’s two films last year fit neatly into Oscar-friendly boxes. So instead, we get a parade of safe bets, while two of the year’s most intoxicating films are left to be debated, defended, and fittingly, desired from a distance.

Queer is currently streaming on MUBI

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