Luca Guadagnino makes movies about lust. William S. Burroughs wrote books about pain. The obvious overlap between those two emotions might suggest a fruitful creative partnership—a provocative picture that marries the writer’s jagged prose with the director’s sensual style. Alas, Queer, Guadagnino’s adaptation of Burroughs’ second novel, is both obtuse and banal, defying comprehension while also courting boredom. It may traffic in addiction, but it isn’t stimulating. It just plunges you into a stupor.
Which might be the whole idea. Being poorly read, I’m only familiar with Burroughs’ work via reputation rather than experience, but I know that he deployed an experimental style designed to mirror his own challenges with substance abuse. To the extent Queer is intended to evoke the perpetual desolation of the junkie, well, mission accomplished I guess? The movie dabbles in purported forms of intrigue—sex, violence, blackmail, journeys in the jungle—but it’s mostly just one long bummer, a sludgy morass of misery.
Of course, given that it’s a Luca Guadagnino picture, Queer is not without its eye-catching diversions. The most obvious of these is Daniel Craig, whose typically glamorous presence is striking here for how severely unappetizing it is. With thick grey-white glasses and a flattened accent, Craig’s William Lee is the opposite of a conventional sex symbol; he is possibly a predator, probably a criminal, and definitely an asshole. Craig’s performance is laudable for its complete lack of vanity—there is no hint of movie-star charisma lurking beneath Lee’s scabrous exterior—but there’s no great depth to it. He’s smart enough not to try to make Lee likable, which means he just reinforces the film’s abiding unpleasantness.
The target of Lee’s rapacious ardor is Eugene (Drew Starkey), a similarly bespectacled, much younger beauty whom he encounters in 1950s Mexico City. The moment when Lee first spies Eugene, their eyes meeting across a grubby thoroughfare as a Nirvana song flares to life, is classic Guadagnino, charging “the look” with palpable longing. (The anachronistic soundtrack also includes cuts from Prince and New Order; the droopy score is by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.) Guadagnino is a merchant of desire—his characters, whether dancers or tennis players or cannibals, are always craving something or (more often) someone—and here he occasionally indulges his fanciful instincts, as in multiple shots where Lee imagines himself reaching out to caress Eugene, his spectral hand shimmering in the frame.
Such visual flourishes are appealing, if only because they distract from the movie’s mundane narrative. Queer is nominally split into three chapters (plus an elliptical epilogue), though those divisions imply greater coherence than Guadagnino and his screenwriter (Justin Kuritzkes) care to muster. It’s tempting to describe the plot as an endless descent, but that’s not quite right, given that Lee basically starts out at the bottom and stays there. He does travel, though; tired of kvetching with a confederate (a heavily bearded Jason Schwartzman) who’s always getting robbed, Lee becomes convinced that a special South American plant will grant him the power of telepathy. He thus embarks for the Amazon rainforest, convincing Eugene to join him via a mixture of seduction and extortion.
Just how does Eugene feel about this older man, this superior intellectual with a gun strapped to his hip who utters words like “anti-clemencies”? It’s unclear, and while such ambiguity is meant to serve as Queer’s thematic engine, it really just highlights the film’s muddled quality. In fact, the handful of sex scenes between the two men are where the movie feels most alive, because it’s the only time they appear to be genuinely enjoying each other’s company.
Otherwise, Queer mostly operates as a series of long, dull passages where Guadagnino struggles to enliven dreary material. The most notable of these is an interminable sequence in which Lee shoots heroin; at first, the camera shields his face from view, instead fixating on his hands as they steadily assemble various paraphernalia, before drifting up and staring at Craig’s impassive gaze. It recalls the famous final shot from Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, but where that image was buttressed by its preceding story, this one has no weight behind it. It’s empty virtuosity.
In Queer’s final third, it fully surrenders to its own abstractions, bringing in Lesley Manville for a haywire appearance as a medicine woman and affording Guadagnino the opportunity to visualize the disembodied mayhem of an ayahuasca trip. This is simultaneously the worst and best part of the movie; having abandoned any semblance of narrative or emotional logic, Guadagnino fully struts his stuff, creating phantasmagorical images of diffuse light and blending bodies.
Is it impressive? Kind of, but it still feels like posturing. Earlier this year, Guadagnino gave us Challengers, a rip-roaring sports movie that demonstrated his gifts as a showman while also centering on richly developed characters. His follow-up is nowhere near as exhilarating; it’s also considerably less intimate, losing its bearings in a hazy emotional fog. Yet the sequence of events makes sense. If Challengers conjured the euphoria of getting high, Queer conveys the agony of coming down.
Grade: C
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.