Queer (2024)

Luca Guadagnino's Queer is, above all else, a film about a gay man wanting another gay man, and it pursues that want with a single-mindedness that borders on the theological. Daniel Craig plays William Lee, an expatriate drifting through 1950s Mexico City, and the camera never leaves his longing for long. The supporting cast is thick with Latin American performers, Henry Zaga and Omar Apollo among them, though the setting functions as atmosphere, not argument. Race is present as texture. It is never a subject. This is a Burroughs adaptation, faithful to the semi-autobiographical source, so there is no historical reframing on offer, no revisionist mischief. The man wrote what he lived.

What the film declines to do is instructive. It stages no climate sermon, no indictment of capital, no celebration of the body as a political site. Lee's body is a site of appetite and decay, which is a different project entirely. His addiction is framed as addiction, not as neurotype. Lesley Manville appears as a botanist in the jungle and is given almost nothing to do beyond brewing ayahuasca, so feminist readings must be smuggled in from outside. The film shows. It rarely tells. Guadagnino has made a sensual, hallucinatory object, and it trusts the audience to meet it halfway.

The result is a landmark of queer cinema that carries almost no messaging apparatus. It is a mood, a swoon, a series of rooms. Craig's performance has been widely and correctly praised. The film was also a box office catastrophe, which the industry will file away under its own grim ledger. For our purposes, we note a work of genuine cultural significance that resists the sermon. It simply exists, beautifully, and lets the congregation find its own way to the pews.