Queer

I was absolutely entranced from start to finish while watching this surprisingly tender film. I love how the first half of it was filled with a strong Wong Kar-wai visual influence, and we also got nodes to Edward Hopper and Hitchcock here and there.
I am going to be profoundly insulted if this doesn't get a Best Sound nomination at the Oscars (which probably will be the case).

Beautiful yet so sad. The feeling of William S. Burroughs work here is spot on. One of the best movies I've seen in quite a while. And Daniel Craig looks better than ever, so it felt natural and believable that the guy would be drawn to him.

Haa hhahahaha can't stop laughing

Luca Guadagnino doesn’t make movies to please—he makes movies to provoke, to drag the audience out of their comfort zone and throw them into a whirlwind of desire, obsession, and excess. “Queer” follows this philosophy to the letter, but in a very particular way: instead of the stylized explosion of “Challengers,” here we get something more restrained on the surface, but boiling underneath. It feels like a lost classic of transgressive ‘80s cinema, with an aesthetic that swings between refinement and delirium, between noir and surrealism. Guadagnino takes the essence of William S. Burroughs’ work—a confessional account of desire and degradation—and turns it into an intoxicating cinematic experience, where the protagonist, played by a Daniel Craig at the top of his game, slowly dissolves into his own obsession.

Craig plays William Lee, an American writer drifting aimlessly through 1950s Mexico City, numbed by heroin and alcohol, as he gets consumed by an enigmatic passion for Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a young man who seems to reciprocate—but never entirely. This push-and-pull dynamic, the gazes that say too much and the gestures that say too little, forms the emotional core of the film. And Guadagnino handles this relationship with a patience that borders on torture, building a game of seduction and disillusionment where the audience, just like Lee, never quite knows where they stand. Starkey turns Eugene into a walking mystery—effortlessly seductive, yet with something hollow in his eyes, as if even he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. That makes him the perfect object for Lee’s fixation, who projects onto him everything he has already lost.

The aesthetic of “Queer” is a statement in itself. Guadagnino mixes old-school filming techniques, like rear projections and miniatures, with a soundtrack that completely ignores the period setting and throws Nirvana in your face. The effect is disorienting, like being trapped inside the mind of a man living in a time that isn’t his. The settings are both physical and psychological—Guadagnino uses space to reflect Lee’s emotional state, whether in the tight, smoke-filled alleys of bars or the oppressive vastness of the jungle. There’s a deliberate theatricality to how the film presents itself, a certain artificiality reminiscent of Fassbinder’s work—one of Guadagnino’s self-proclaimed idols. But while Fassbinder used this detachment to analyze society, Guadagnino uses it to put us inside his protagonist’s head. The world around Lee never feels completely real because, to him, the only real thing is Eugene.

What starts as an ambiguous, self-destructive romance turns, in the third act, into a full-blown descent into madness. Lee follows Eugene to the edges of the jungle in search of a drug that supposedly grants telepathic abilities—an obsession that echoes both his chemical addiction and his insatiable need to understand the other. At this point, the film abandons any pretense of realism and fully embraces the absurd. Leslie Manville appears as a deranged scientist, in a role that feels ripped straight out of a hallucinatory nightmare. The images become increasingly disconnected, time distorts, and the movie plunges headfirst into the psychedelic. Guadagnino isn’t afraid to push “Queer” to the extreme, turning the narrative into a grotesque, hypnotic spectacle.

And that’s the film’s real triumph: it doesn’t ask permission to be excessive. In an era of sanitized cinema, where even transgressions feel calculated, “Queer” is a film that refuses to be tamed. Daniel Craig delivers one of the best performances of his career, completely dismantling his action-star image to become a pathetic, desperate man, with no filter and no brakes. Starkey, on the other hand, is an ethereal presence—an enigma that never fully unravels. Guadagnino, as always, films bodies and gestures with an almost fetishistic gaze, but here, there’s something more: a discomfort, a latent desperation. “Queer” isn’t just a film about desire—it’s a film about the agony of wanting and never being able to truly possess.

“Queer” goes too far. And that’s the point. Guadagnino makes no concessions, doesn’t try to make his film more palatable to a wider audience. He builds a world that feels ripped from a fever dream and forces the viewer to live inside it. The result is a film that, like its protagonist, teeters between the sublime and the ridiculous, between the mesmerizing and the repulsive. A film that challenges, that irritates, that fascinates. In the end, isn’t that what cinema is supposed to do?

My expectations betrayed me with this film, not because of the quality but because of the type of story. Far from being a queer romance in 20th century Mexico, it is a personal quest that gets lost in the metaphor as the plot progresses.

I understand that the protagonist is looking for an emotional partner in an environment where homosexual relationships are physical and casual, nothing more, so he seeks the ability to read men's minds to get out of doubt. Although he is shown stagnant, with addiction and alcoholism problems, I missed knowing more about the character: what is his past?, what has made him get to the point of betting everything on the first man who plays along? where does the insecurity that leads him to buy Eugene with trips come from?, why does he settle for indifference?

As for Eugene's character, he owes me a lot of information, I don't understand him, he says yes to everything, he neither takes a position nor stops doing it, we don't know where he comes from, but even less how he ends up, what does he want.

Daniel Craig nails this character, something that is completely out of his profile, and the film has good photography and setting; even so, I had to make many assumptions to try to understand the end, and even so I have not succeeded.

I know that award seasons can be competitive and snubs are inevitable, but Daniel Craig was overlooked for his outstanding performance in Queer.

People have said it goes off the rails, becoming crazy and trippy towards the end, as if the movie wasn't already like that.

I wonder what Richard siken would think about this movie

Mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, this is the best work I've seen from Daniel Craig - he's beyond fantastic in this. There are also lots of strong visuals, especially towards the end of the film.

On the other hand, I definitely felt this dragged. I haven't read the book, but I am familiar with some of Burroughs' other work, and I do appreciate that his style of writing is not exactly the easiest to translate on screen. This film has very little in terms of a plot.

As great as I found Daniel Craig to be, the co-lead didn't really do it for me. He was fine, but I felt he was constantly overshadowed by how brilliant Craig was in every scene.

Will need to reflect on this some more, but as of now, I can't say I'm in a rush to watch it again.

“I’m not queer, I’m disembodied” is such a tragic line. This film had great moments, but as a whole doesn't quite hit it out of the park. This could be the best acting I've ever seen out of Daniel Craig. I do respect that Luca Guadagnino continues to make beautiful films that look like pieces of art. I think the film suffers from dragging at times.

Edward Hopper where you at