Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey star in Luca Guadagnino’s slightly depressing romance that’s hard to watch at times. Here’s our Queer review.
In a post-war Mexico City, Daniel Craig’s Lee is lonely. A middle-aged American expat drifting from bar to bar with a heroin addiction almost as crippling as his own insecurities, he and a half-dozen other gay men pass each other like ships in a near-deserted city which scarcely seems to acknowledge their existence. When he catches the eye of Drew Starkey’s enigmatic Navy serviceman, Eugene Allerton, what starts as a crush quickly snowballs into full-fledged obsession, and Lee drags him into the Mexican jungle to seek out a drug which will let him see just what’s in the young man’s head.
Re-teaming director Luca Guadagnino with Challengers screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, Queer arrives less than a year after the pair’s steamy tennis drama launched them into the mainstream. Based on William S Burroughs’ novella of the same name, published in 1985, it returns Guadagnino to the outsider-romance sub-genre which has seen his star rise over the last decade. This is no Call Me By Your Name, though.
If Lombardy’s heat was the clean and lazy scorch of an idealised Italian summer, Mexico City feels as sick and empty as a protagonist who spends much of the film shivering from an opioid withdrawal he refuses to address at the root. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography paints the city so vividly you can practically smell the tequila soaked into the floorboards.
In that way, Queer has more in common with Bones And All – a meandering, melancholy odyssey which treats desire more like an illness than an emotion. Like the star-crossed lovers of his 2022 cannibal-romance, there’s a tragedy to Lee’s story that is, at times, almost difficult to watch. That the film spends much of its first half sedately plodding between bars before abruptly swapping locales for its final act doesn’t necessarily help us stay engaged, and though Lesley Manville’s scene-stealing role as a gun-toting psychedelic botanist remains a highlight, the lurch unfortunately manages to feel like an addendum even as it’s one of the few sequences to move the plot forward.
Though Craig is brilliantly contradictory in the lead, swapping bravado with self-loathing at the drop of a hat, the film around him feels a little too bleak for its plot-lite wanderings to reach a satisfying conclusion. Opposite him, Starkey’s Allerton never feels like much more than an enigma. Next to Craig’s everything-on-the-table performance, the aloof, occasionally cruel young man feels more like a blank slate for the audience to imbue with their own desires. That’s all very well, but he doesn’t help make a quietly depressing film any less frustrating.
I expect, of course, that this is sort of the point. Guadagnino has already proved himself an expert at taking stories of love and desire and showing the ugliness beneath. Whether you’re willing to watch him do it again is up to you.
Queer is now in UK cinemas.
