Luca Guadagnino – 'Queer' movie review

Nobody has had a better year than Luca Guadagnino – the commercial success of Challengers simultaneously revitalised the erotic thriller and made tennis seem like a vaguely appealing sport. However, I had several qualms with the film (for reasons that I won’t get into), but mostly because it felt like a story with no substance, which is very much in contrast to the nuanced emotional layers present in his earlier work. And when I saw that Queer was being sold as a ‘new love story’, I felt tepidly intrigued and wary. But after a less immediate and underwhelming gush of praise towards Queer, I wondered whether that pointed towards a less commercial or palatable story, and after seeing it at the London Film Festival, I felt both disturbed, relieved and thrilled by what I had seen. My theory had been confirmed – Guadagnino had redeemed himself.

As an adaptation of the William Burroughs novel, Queer tells the story of William Lee, a middle-aged expat living in New Mexico whose monotonous and lonely existence is disturbed by the presence of a much younger man called Eugene. While Guadagnino is undoubtedly a master at voicing the many heartaches and pains that come with actually being in a relationship, Queer is the first that explores the deep loneliness of unreciprocated love as someone who is queer, painting it as this deeply fracturing and out of body experience, with William yearning for intimacy but unable to openly express this. 

William spends his time in seedy bars and clubs, sitting in deserted corners as he scans the room for bodies and other silently longing men, searching for validation and scraps of love that could temporarily lift him from the shackles of being unseen. As someone who has built a career on the image of hyper-masculinity, there could be no better man than Daniel Craig to play the William; completely transformed from his usual aura of effortless charm to being haunting and pitifully desperate as he skulks the streets in search of human connection and everything that lies between the cracks. He awkwardly tries to meet the gaze of the men around him; looking for an unspoken acknowledgement of attraction as he locks eyes with each stranger, painfully viewing every loaded glance and gesture as the one to finally save him. He intensely pines for anything that vaguely resembles attention, with his eyes burning holes into everyone that meets his gaze.

It captures the suffocating loneliness of being queer in a place where your identity has to be discreet, trying to communicate your humanity through a lingering touch and hoping that someone will silently understand while most recoil and are repulsed by the implications of your existence.   

After meeting Eugene, William becomes completely infatuated by the idea of being close to him, meek and unsure of himself as he tries to express his desires through coded glances and awkward gestures, anxiously asking for reassurance from his one queer friend on whether or not Eugene is one of them. “I want to talk to you, without speaking”, he finally says, mustering the courage to boldly express the feeling that is usually silenced.

Despite Eugene’s cryptic response that reveals little about the hidden depths William suspects they both share, the two begin spending time together, even when it is clear that Eugene doesn’t care for him in the same way. Drew Starkey is hypnotic in the role, drawing you in with his stoic demeanour and sinister silence, leaving you feeling as mesmerised and frantic as William, whose feverish infatuation only grows the longer it goes unreciprocated. His obsession slowly becomes an addiction, unable to tell between healthy and unhealthy desires, and he loses himself in a delusional hope that engulfs him entirely. Through the use of eerie and slightly grotesque dream sequences, we see William’s inner world as the line between fantasy and reality fades, dreaming of a hand that will graze his knee or lightly brush over his ribcage, wanting something so pure and simple that it feels cruel when you realise it isn’t possible.

Queer is perhaps Guadgnino’s most experimental film to date, and he masterfully uses this jarring tonal style to explore queerness as a surrealist experience that slowly twists you into a disembodied figure, with William’s image being likened to that of a centipede, with nauseating sequences of bugs that crawl across bed sheets and skin, comparing his existence to that of an insect. The surrealism comes from the intense alienation of being treated as ‘other’ by the people around him for daring to express his need of wanting to be loved/seen, becoming a discombobulated and ghost-like figure that has been dehumanised as a result of his queerness.

The Italian director goes against the lush romanticism he is known for by creating a grimy and uncomfortable visual style in his portrait of loneliness and desperation, which is only slightly hindered in some scenes by the slightly dodgy visual effects. However, whatever is lacking in the visual effects is made up for in the incredibly visceral and unnerving sound design, with a horror-like score being used during the love scenes to play on the idea that William’s sexuality is perverse and something to be feared, with a raw undercurrent of danger pulsing through each interaction with Eugene. The needle drops are no exception, with Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘All Apologies’ setting the tone during the opening credits, with one mesmerising use of Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ while Craig haunts the streets.

William hides his lack of fulfilment behind a facade of joviality, but despite this, he continuously tells people that he feels ‘disembodied’. After watching Guadagnino’s haunting odyssey of delusion and dehumanisation, you too will feel fragmented and broken, devastated by Wiliam’s innocent pursuit of connection as he turns himself inside out to be accepted, going to each far corner of the world to make himself worthy for the one he loves.

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