‘A feverish, quiet and sad exploration of longing and falling in love’

Just nine months after the triumphant Grand Slam of Challengersdirector Luca Guadagnino is back again. Queer is a very different beast to his earlier, tennis-based ménage à trois: less straightforwardly entertaining, murkier and messier in its intentions and approach. But it has all his recurring themes and obsessions: sex and lust and longing and melancholy. It is also perhaps almost too dull for its own good.

Challengers writer Justin Kuritzkes reunites with his director to (loosely) adapt the short story of the same name by writer William S. Burroughs. Less subversive than Burroughs’ most famous work, Naked lunchin Guadagnino and Kuritzke’s hands, it becomes more intensely personal, leaning into the book’s autobiographical elements, an unorthodox tribute to the Beat Generation hero.

Daniel Craig – eagerly distancing himself from Bond with every role he’s taken on since hanging up his Walther PPK – is phenomenal as Burroughs surrogate William Lee, an American expat in the gay-cruising paradise of Mexico City. (Interestingly, the era’s homophobia exists only as an ambient hum.) Though impeccably stylish in contemporary summer-casual linen by costume designer Jonathan Anderson, Lee is awkward and vulnerable and boyish—traits only amplified when he meets Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). ), a handsome younger man. Their first meeting, soundtracked by Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ – a brilliant needle-drop in more ways than one – pulses with excitement, Lee subsequently pursuing him with a hunger that turns to desperation. Allerton’s beauty and poise somehow throw Lee off his center; Guadagnino is adept at finding tension in these early encounters, sexual or otherwise.

The film begins to falter when they leave the safe skies of Mexico City for an ill-advised journey to South America. Lee doesn’t seem to know where he stands with the enigmatic Allerton, and for a moment it feels like we, the audience, don’t either. The film teeters on its own axis, its dreamlike obscurity almost overwhelming. Itching to find out if Allerton really is queer, Lee travels into the jungles of Ecuador in search of the psychedelic drug ayahuasca, hoping it will unlock the secrets of telepathy – an extreme reaction to what he perceives as private tyranny of mind.

That hunt reaches a surreal climax with an unrecognizable, unforgettable performance from Lesley Manville as the eccentric shaman – small in screen time but big in impact. These trippy third act sequences, which see the two men’s bodies literally melt together before our eyes, are freakish and yet strangely moving, heartbreaking, even. It feels like Guadagnino distilled: an erotic display of bodily hunger, underpinned by sadness. Queer may not be his best film, but it is undoubtedly his most him.