Film Review - Queer

Daniel Craig dominates Luca Guadagnino's hallucinatory adaptation of William S Burroughs's novella

Dec 19, 2024

There’s a good deal of awards buzz around Daniel Craig’s central role in Queer, with some critics claiming it’s his best-ever performance. Whilst I agree it’s a fine turn, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say it’s his best. However, the role is fine-tuned to the attention of awards ceremonies. Specifically, it has a demonstrative physicality and commitment not just to the graphic sex scenes but also to the cold turkey miseries of opiate withdrawal and the emotional intensity of the story’s hallucinatory metaphors.

Director Luca Guadagnino has had a strong year with this and Challengers. The former is much more accessible to a wide audience, but this is the bolder film. Based on a novella by William S Burroughs, the story begins in 1950s Mexico City, with hedonistic expat William Lee (Craig) boozing and sleeping with various young men. He meets another expat, GI Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), and an affair begins. But Eugene is often mercurial and stand-offish, as he doesn’t view himself as “queer” in the same way as Lee. This frustrates the libidinous Lee, who desires physical and emotional connection whilst also battling demons of drug addiction.

Eventually, the pair decide to take a trip to South America. Lee is particularly interested in tracking down a psychedelic drug that grants supposed telepathic abilities. Along the way, things aren’t always smooth sailing between Lee and Eugene. Lee is also told the drug he seeks, derived from a mysterious plant, will open a door that can never be closed. Such enigmatic warnings are foreshadowed in peculiar hallucinations, along with a scene in a cinema when the pair watch a key moment from Jean Cocteau’s classic Orpheus (1950).

Guadagnino’s recurrent melancholy themes of outsiders grappling with desire, longing, and otherness are given specific focus through Burroughs’s source material since the author was widely believed to be gay. However, the film doesn’t depict any overt homophobia, despite one sensing a lurking undercurrent of it outside the Mexico City gay community with which Lee interacts. Incidentally, Lee can be seen as a stand-in for the author, given parallels to events from Burroughs’s life, including a notorious tragic incident involving his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer.

Performances in the supporting cast are good, especially a rather bonkers Lesley Manville, playing a gun-wielding shaman doctor paranoid about people stealing her research. Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom make great use of digital landscapes that slightly reminded me of the magical realist location backdrops in Powell-Pressburger films (though, in their case, they obviously used matte paintings). There are a few deftly deployed anachronistic needle-drops at appropriate moments, most notably “Come as You Are” by Nirvana and “Leave Me Alone” by New Order. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross also contribute an innovative score.

Things get immensely weird towards the end (a compliment from me, to be clear), playing in some ways like a bleaker version of the finale of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I was also occasionally reminded of another surreal Burroughs adaptation, David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991). But Queer is its own beast; unmistakably Guadagnino, and clearly a highly personal project with much to say not only about identity but also obsessive insecurity over what one’s partner might think.

It isn’t unflawed — the pace is perhaps too slow at times, stuttering a little in the middle — but with fine direction and Craig’s arresting central performance, there is much to admire. Whether that admiration will translate to liking is down to the individual viewer. In my case, I was much more on the admiration side, and it should be clear from this review that it won’t be for everyone. But it isn’t a film I’ll forget any time soon, and for that, Queer deserves considerable credit.

(Originally published at Medium.)