Daniel Craig does the best work of his career in Luca Guadagnino’s deeply surreal LGBTQ drama

I have not read the William S. Burroughs novel that Queer it’s adapted, but if you told me Luca Guadagnino destroyed it and started from scratch, I’d believe you. Your latest film seems to me to be in clear conversation with your previous work, as if the sensibilities of his four previous features were combined into one film. It’s an enigmatic experience that I desperately want to spend this space interpreting. But I’ll refrain from going into too much detail and just offer the lens I saw it through.

In 1950s Mexico City, American expatriate William Lee (Daniel Craig) travels in search of young men to sleep with. There is a method to discovering a willing partner, and for Lee, that means keeping verbal communication to a minimum. If he’s talking, as is the freckled Jewish boy in the opening scene, things aren’t going very well. But we see what it’s like when he succeeds, and when he reaches for a man’s necklace with feigned curiosity, he finds a hand sliding up his thigh.

Daniel Craig does the best work of his career on Queer

The film’s true theme is buried in her performance

This makes fellow American Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) particularly irritating. Their eyes meet in a cockfight, and they seem to connect. When they talk, things are friendly, even flirty. But he also seems very friendly with another woman. Not knowing seems painful to Lee. Your lust manifests itself physically as a kind of desperationalmost like a disease. Joe (Jason Schwartzman), Lee’s friend and brother-in-arms, reminds him that he can always to askbut that would seem to ruin everything he really seeks.

Form and content are subtly in tune in these first scenes. While daylight is bright and demystifying, the world around these characters feels a little unreal at night, tinged with dreamy blues and violets. Our attunement with the physical body is also intensified, in classic Guadagnino style. Starkey is almost always artfully composed, but Craig alternates between smooth and controlled to a sweaty, sunken-eyed mess. The more Lee attacks, the worse he looks, but the healing intimacy of a successful night spills over into the cinematography.

To enter the realm of meaning, This fluctuation in Lee’s physical state is crucial to understanding his relationship with his homosexuality. He struggles with drug use, but that’s less a direct explanation of his behavior than a way to make us confuse queerness and addiction, as I believe this character does. Although Lee appears to live openly, self-loathing courses beneath Craig’s performance (among his best), occasionally peeking into dialogue. And something about Gene makes him the ultimate solution.

Queer gets more and more surreal as it goes on

Including the most mind-blowing images from Luca Guadagnino’s career

He brings up, initially in passing, what he read about a drug called yage, discovered in the South American rainforest. Supposedly increases natural telepathic ability; the Soviets have tested this in mind control experiments. Lee’s interest in yage becomes an increasingly important part of Queeralthough for a long time it has been unclear exactly why he is after it. He would like to have stronger control over Gene, who is fickle with his attention. Would telepathy help him do this? Would you control the mind?

Guadagnino makes this a topic of constant interpretation. As yage becomes a greater focus, Queer leans towards surreal imagery, specifically through dreams. The images the film evokes are among the most striking in the director’s filmography, often channeling the visceral physicality of Suspiria and Bones and all. These dreams hold the keys to Lee’s psyche, and I recommend doing the work of unpacking them as soon as possible, if only to flex those muscles. You’ll need it warmed up right away. Queer comes to an end.

I really admire what Guadagino and his collaborators achieved with this film. It is as rewarding as it is challenging; It’s possible that, over time, I’ll start to like it even more. I believe that ultimately it is about self-acceptance, or more precisely, the transcendence of selflessness. This is by no means the only reading available, and I look forward to seeing what shapes Queer it takes when others do the work of untangling it.

Queer premiered at the Venice Film Festival and is now showing in cinemas. The film is 135 minutes long and is rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, strong drug content, language and brief violence.