Regardless of opinion, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer will be one of the wildest films of this year.
2022, Guadagnino finally gets his chance to film one of his dream adaptations: William S. Burrough’s Queer, an incomplete novella by William S. Burroughs. Unlike most authors, Burroughs has a reputation for his novels and writings being impossible to adapt onto film. When David Cronenberg tackled the author’s most famous work, Naked Lunch, he made a clever decision to weave in parts of the novel with a complex biography of Burrough’s personal life. Although the novel Queer follows a more traditional narrative structure, the biggest problem that Guadagnino faces is creating an ending to the story with the help of literary scholars who have extensively studied Burroughs’s career.
With a stellar performance by Daniel Craig, the film follows the personal journey of Lee, an insecure older man living in Mexico City who seeks to form a relationship with the young Allerton (played by Drew Starkey). And even with how much more comprehensible the novella is in comparison to Naked Lunch, Guadagnino develops a film that is chaotic, unsettling, and unpredictable in its direction, an important parallel to the tradition-defying nature of the Beat Generation literary movement. Through this narrative style, Guadagnino gets experimental with his use of sound and image. There are several moments in this film that will make audiences wonder if they’re watching the same movie as everyone else is.
With an original score by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross (Guadagnino’s third collaboration after 2022’s Bones and All and 2024’s Challengers), the film juggles around with some orchestral pieces, intense synths, and a nicely curated selection of rock music from artists such as Nirvana, Prince, and Radiohead. The movie utilizes the music carefully, greatly influencing the atmosphere and tone for the scenes. In many scenes, the sound design of this film experiments with the placement of sound, especially with the unsettling droning sounds by Reznor & Ross that orbit around the theater room.
But the most notable aspect of Guadagnino’s Queer is in its unfiltered depiction of sex. The movie does not cut away from the intense expressions of the actors, a kind of intensity that is similar to Burroughs’s own battle with American censorship boards in his literary works. During a period of mass repression, in which gay men weren’t as easily comfortable with expressing their own sexuality, Craig’s performance does a great job of emphasizing these struggles with his awkward attitude and his ability to emphasize minute details to viewers with his precise, blue-eyed gazes (well introduced in the first scene). This is a performance that greatly contrasts with the colder nature of Craig’s interpretation of James Bond, a criticism that Craig challenges in both Spectre (2015) and No Time to Die (2021).
Queering is defined as a term to refer to the question of heteronormativity or the norms of sexuality and gender of its time. Even for a story that is written in the 1950s, Queer is a movie that is already battling the censorship of sexuality on film in some countries [1]. This is Guadagnino’s most personal work yet, a film that is challenging many different systems of oppression around the world. The movie also tackles narrative structure, which is also the film’s greatest problem for a general audience. Here, we are given a movie that isn’t afraid to experiment with storytelling and design, even if an idea or two fails to translate well (and there are a few). It is too bizarre for most people to enjoy, but I think there’s a deep personal core in this film that Guadagnino is conveying that is so mesmerizing, especially in its beautifully haunting ending.
To make a prediction: The bold nature of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer will continue to resonate with future generations of moviegoers. And the film’s ending is not only a deep personal reflection but also an open-ended question on the future of freedom of expression for LGBTQ+, leaving audiences to question how one can challenge sociocultural constructs and the different narratives on gender, sexuality, and identity that continue to evolve as time passes by. This is what made Guadagnino’s Queer one of the most unique films of the year.
4.5/5 Stars
[1]: On November 2024, Turkey has issued a ban on the film. This prompted MUBI, one of the biggest international film distributors/streaming services who became one of the international distributors for this film, to cancel their annual film festival set in Istanbul. Both the distributor and Guadagnino himself argued in their respective statements that this was a restriction on art and freedom of expression.