Italian director Luca Guadagnino captures erotic desire on film better than almost anyone working today. He’s probably best known for his sensuous romantic films like the 2009’s I Am Love and the 2017 Best Picture nominee Call Me By Your Name. Those films are wistful and nostalgic, with a joyful perspective on sexuality, whether straight or gay. But recently Guadagnino explored the darker, more twisted side of erotic desire in films like 2024’s Challengers, a tennis movie which features a love triangle based on homoerotic competition and psychosexual manipulation.
In Queer, adapted by Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes from the unfinished novel by Beat Generation icon William S. Burroughs, Guadagnino depicts erotic desire as a kind of addiction.
The story is divided into three parts. When we first meet William Lee, an independently wealthy American, played by James Bond star Daniel Craig, he is intensely lonely, drinking his days away in 1950s Mexico City where he trolls for young men to seduce. It is an unflattering character for the typically suave Craig to play. Like a junkie, Lee is jittery and ill-at-ease in his own body, craving a man’s touch.
Lee meets Eugene Allerton, a young sailor recently discharged from the U.S. Navy played by Drew Starkey (recently in Netflix’s Outer Banks). Allerton does not identify as gay but, for a supposedly straight man, he seems to have an unusual and ambiguous level of interest in Lee’s queer identity. In any event Allerton enjoys Lee’s company, and the two eventually become lovers.
Then, in the movie’s second part, Lee convinces Allerton to accompany him on a tour of South America. At this point, the story becomes even less romantic and focuses on Lee’s struggle with opiate addition, a literal and external expression of Lee’s “addiction” to queerness. But Allerton is increasingly bored with their friendship, agreeing to have sex no more than twice a week, while Lee becomes needier and more possessive.
In the final third of the film, Lee and Allerton seek out an American botanist researching the hallucinogenic drink Ayahuasca, deep in the jungle. Lee read a magazine article about how both the CIA and KGB are experimenting with the hallucinogenic drug, which is said to have telepathic properties. Telepathy is of particular interest to Lee, who yearns for direct connection with another soul.
The psychedelic effects of Ayahuasca infuse these scenes, but Guadagnino incorporates bits of surreal imagery throughout all three parts of the film, drawing from the postmodern style of Burroughs’s other novels like Naked Lunch. Some of these images are as gory as anything in Guadagnino’s hyper-bloody 2022 cannibalistic horror-romance Bones and All, but the surrealism in Queer is more likely to be beautiful than creepy, closer to Magritte than David Lynch (and a fair distance from Cronenberg), while still being mysterious and powerful.
One recurring surreal image is a centipede, which is a recurring motif in Burroughs’s work. Another dream sequence, where Lee drunkenly kills a woman while trying to shoot a whiskey glass off her head like William Tell, is a reference to a real-life incident when Burroughs shot his wife. These and other references to the wider story of Burroughs’s life and writing still work even for viewers unfamiliar with the literary history of the Beat Generation.
Queer is the work of a master filmmaker, but like the character of Lee or even William Burroughs himself, it can be an off-putting film, prickly, scattered, and hard to connect with. The three movements of the story have somewhat different tones that don’t entirely gel, and the ending is not entirely satisfying.
But Craig’s Lee remains a fascinating psyche, leading an exploration of obsession and the desire for spiritual connection. It establishes a portrait of queerness as existential loneliness. In the 1950s when the story takes place, it wasn’t as easy as asking someone if they were gay. Lee has to study people, experiment conversationally, and look for subtle clues: Can they see you as an object of desire the way you see them? A false move could scare them away or invite violence.
This explains Lee’s internalized homophobia. Like the real-life Burroughs, Lee dislikes the more flamboyantly gay people – those whose stereotype, he believes, led the American Psychological Association of his day to categorize homosexuality as mental illness and sexual perversion. This is a movie about the psychological damage being labeled “queer” had at that time.
Queer has all the luscious photography and steamy sex scenes you expect from Luca Guadagnino, plus fun anachronistic music from bands like Nirvana and Prince. It’s also a messy, meandering study of a damaged soul, studded with surrealistic images, and uneasily squeezed into triptych structure. For a mainstream Hollywood release, that’s pretty queer.
