Review: Queer is a languid portrait of love, lust and addiction that is beautiful and, at times, agonizing to behold | Canada Voices

Queer

Directed by Luca Guadagnino

Written by Justin Kuritzkes, based on the novel by William Burroughs

Starring Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey

Classification R; 135 minutes

Luca Guadagnino is a fan of the book-to-screen adaptation. His 2017 breakout hit, Call Me By Your Name, was base on the 2007 novel of the same name by Andre Aciman, as was his 2022 cannibal romance Bones and All. And earlier this week, his upcoming adaptation of American Psycho made headlines for announcing that Austin Butler has been cast as the film’s lead.

Queer, Guadagnino’s second theatrical release of 2024 (the first, Challengers, was delayed from fall 2023 to early 2024 due to the writers’ strike), is itself an adaptation of William Burrough’s unfinished 1952 novella (published in 1985) of the same name. It’s a languid portrait of love, lust and addiction that is as beautiful and, at times, agonizing to behold as the love affair at its centre.

Burroughs wrote the book while he was awaiting trial for the murder of his wife, Joan Vollmer (Burroughs was gay, but was also twice-married, to women). The film stars Daniel Craig as William Lee, Burroughs’s loosely veiled autobiographical version of himself, a heroin-addicted gay man on retreat-cum-exile in Mexico City. There, he meets Eugene Allerton, recently discharged from the Navy. The two begin a flirtation – or, at least, Lee does with Allerton, initially unsure of his sexual orientation. And once the two do finally fall into bed, flirtation gives way to the quiet, agonizing obsession of a man whose affections are not quite unrequited, but whose enthusiasm is.

Queer is almost a return to his Call Me By Your Name form, in style – long, lingering shots in a foreign locale; near-palpable heat; dark, dusky rooms filled with smoke, liquor and longing. Guadagnino’s generally florid visual style may have seemed at odds with the material, with Burroughs favouring a distinct ugliness in his prose. But remember: This is the director who made a beautiful art-house film out of cannibalism, without softening a single edge. The same can be said of his adaptation of Queer. It is a remarkably beautiful portrait of agony, anchored by Craig’s remarkably understated performance.

But it’s also a film at odds with itself. With Queer, Guadagnino has made a movie unsure of its own identity, visually and stylistically. Too often, he opts for quasi-experimental, surrealist visuals to convey Lee’s inner turmoil, but instead of adding depth to the film, these scenes pull the viewer out of it completely. So, too, do Guadagnino’s anachronistic music and sound choices – 80s New Wave and 90s grunge bump up against otherworldly sound effects that are all, frankly, sometimes too high up in the mix, adding to the disconnect in a way that is at times overwhelming.

The cumulative effect of all this is a film that is often at best frustrating, at worst off-putting. And by the time viewers reach Queer’s third and final chapter, a jungle-set drug trip led by a suitably unhinged Lesley Manville, curiosity about Guadagnino’s next trick may have given way to exasperation.

Perhaps this is all intentional. Lee, too, is a man at odds with himself and his identity. And Guadagnino is an expert at visually conveying the feverish, dissociative state of being – and knowing you are – the other, and of moving through the world trying to both reconcile and repress that knowledge. There is a dislocation to Queer, just as there is a dislocation to Lee. “I’m not queer,” he says in one fever-dreamy scene, “I’m disembodied.”

If it was Guadagnino’s ambition to have his audience feel, literally, Lee’s sense of unease and alienation, he has accomplished this. Whether that makes Queer an enjoyable film is less clear. But maybe that’s the point.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)