by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, David Lowery, Ariel Schulman
Intro:
… soars off Daniel Craig’s intoxicating energy on-screen, making even the repeated drowning of sorrows strangely attractive, while the film craft around him keeps the product pure so that his emotional yearning hits at full force.
Fresh off 2024’s sexiest film, Challengers, director Luca Guadagnino and writer Justin Kuritzkes’ new collaboration sees them dealing in much sadder tones. Their conceptualisation of William S. Burroughs’ novel of the same name banks on a similar sweaty salirophilia, but where Challengers looked at the stresses and trials that come with maintaining a connection with someone else, Queer stares directly into the void that must be crossed to create that connection in the first place.
Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography of the humid 1950s Mexico City ‘friend of Dorothy’ environment and Guadagnino’s attraction to warm but presentable colour palettes is better suited to Burroughs’ writings than with their (still excellent) Suspiria remake. It arguably sticks closer to Argento’s approach to colour than that remake, with motel rooms of solid greens, blues, and reds adding to the surreal atmosphere enveloping Daniel Craig’s Lee.
Craig has been steadily showing an affinity for playing offbeat Americans (Knives Out, Logan Lucky), and his turn here might just be his best. He taps into a similar seductive energy as Armie Hammer in Guadagnino’s beloved Call Me by Your Name.
Guadagnino’s take on Burroughs’ unique perspective of the world – similar to Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch adaptation – sees prominent drug use and its after-effects, wallowing in juicy body horror, ghostly apparitions of connections that could be, and Kubrick homages, presenting the fruitless search for connection that goes beyond sex, to be an existential dread all its own.
Queer rips out the collective urge for intimacy and, over its two hours and change, slowly turns it on its head to reveal the many used needles sticking out of it. It soars off Daniel Craig’s intoxicating energy on-screen, making even the repeated drowning of sorrows strangely attractive, while the film craft around him keeps the product pure so that his emotional yearning hits at full force. As a depiction of Gay courtship at a time when it was treated in the same hushed codewords as governmental espionage, it’s an eye-opener, and as an adaptation of a legendarily unfilmable writer, it does justice to one of the Beat Generation’s finest prodigies.
