Queer

There are few filmmakers currently working who’ve risen the ranks of cinematic stardom this century as consistently ambitious, versatile, intelligent, and entirely singular as Luca Guadagnino. Modern cinema’s signature queer provocateur? The best depictor of intimacy in film history? A fearless audiovisual stylist? All completely apt monikers for the man. From the messy foray into intimacy and identity of Call Me By Your Name, to the found love and belonging on the fringes of society of Bones and All, to the sultry psychosexual games and vying power dynamics of Challengers, Guadagnino is always centering human intimacy and queer-adjacent themes in his stories through challenging new angles. One would be forgiven for thinking the high-energy, tennis-laden, sexually charged unofficial love triangle exposé on codependency Challengers would be his 2024 creative zenith, but he had another surprise up his sleeve: the frankly named but entirely unorthodox Queer. Perhaps it was time for Guadagnino to quit beating around the bush, to dive headfirst into the utter essence of queerness, to drown in a selfless act of self-destruction — all to glean a modicum of understanding of the enigma that is queer love.

“Gay Beau is Afraid” accusations notwithstanding, Queer is a Guadagnino outing in every sense of the word: his knee-jerk urges completely unbridled, his rambling philosophies on love laid bare for the world to only hope to semi-digest. Queer follows William Lee, a solitary American expatriate living in Mexico, who spends his days deliriously under the influence of opiates and in search of sexual rendezvous with other, usually younger, men. Lee, played by an impeccable Daniel Craig, isn’t like the other queers he resents. He’s not a flamboyant partygoer in search of mutual community. He’s stoic and silent, begrudgingly indulging his sexual urges with an emotional distance he deems digestible and medicating his insecurity and loneliness away with his drugs. But this all changes when Eugene, Drew Starkey’s young GI fellow expatriate, arrives in town. Lee immediately sets his sights on the sexually ambiguous Eugene, taking his emotional impenetrability as a challenge, an enigma to decode and understand on a deeper level. One drug replaces another.

The results are a hypnotic, hallucinatory, wholly unpredictable journey through the deep recesses of Lee’s repressed humanity as he tries to understand something as indecipherable as the true love and all-encompassing desire for another human being. Lee untethers himself from the safe psychological fortress he’s constructed for his own sanity and loses himself in his adoration for another, perhaps for the first time ever. Such a gleeful abandon of tangible constructs would be cerebral under any circumstance, but the drugs certainly don’t help matters. Alcohol, heroin, and a hunt for ayahuasca punctuate this truly otherworldly story that defies easy description, and Craig and Starkey are fully on board with the ride. I must repeat that Craig has never been better, while Starkey’s inscrutability makes the perfect foil. These characters do little in the way of openly conveying their feelings. They’re solitary, listless beings by nature, conditioned by society to suppress their true feelings beyond the realm of verbal description. The sensibility we glean from them stems from their expressions, fleeting gestures, and drug-fueled escapades into mutual psychological absolution. Love is near impossible to comprehend for the most well-adjusted among us. For characters as romantically shut off as these, it’s a reality-shattering endeavor.

While watching this film, I often thought fondly back to Phoebe Bridgers’ seminal “Moon Song”: a modern sonic master work by any metric, and one specifically about the self-described “step on me” phenomenon of romance. “Moon Song” embodies this idea that you can love someone so much, you would destroy everything you’ve ever known, annihilate your physical form, and conjoin yourself with their being just to hope to truly understand and belong with them for infinity. Such excessive feelings may feel foreign to some, but some of us are lucky enough to feel such a way once or twice in our lives. That is what Queer is about. How does one depict the psychological, metaphysical urge to obliterate oneself and give one’s entire being over to selfless love and desire? Well, it seems Luca Guadagnino has found a way, and we revel in his sheer cinematic mastery. Much doesn’t make sense in a literal sense, but as we see Lee’s splintered psyche painted on the screen as vibrant, wonderfully insane world building, we begin to hone in on a picture of the true feelings Eugene has helped to usher out. His past and his insecurities collide with his true self and desire in a brilliant, colorful apocalypse of the soul. A sense of dying and being reborn is not a hyperbolic description in this case. The illustriousness of the frantic romance borders on being a religious experience. Divine revelations on what love really is abound.

Beyond Guadagnino’s bonkers vision and the dedicated, nuanced, otherworldly turns of Craig and Starkey, surely Justin Kurtizkes, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Marco Costa, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross deserve all the praise in the world for writing, shooting, editing, and scoring this and Challengers respectively in the same year. In doing so, have crafted a technical one-two punch for the ages. Kurtizkes’ sexy, twisted Challengers script perhaps deserves more credit than it receives for its thoughtful observations on its codependent trio and campy gags, but Queer is a completely new level of screenwriting. As previously alluded to, very little of what Queer intends to say is actually said verbally, but that in itself is a writing feat of incredible magnitude. Oceans of meaning are conveyed through the subtlest of interactions and gestures. As the film goes fully off the deep end into the recesses of a drugged up, tortured, self-loathing psyche, it never loses trace of the core themes it has anchored itself to. The film is otherworldly and utterly surreal, but never without cause. Every hyper-bizarre visual manifestation paraded across the screen stems from the potent undercurrent of love, desire, and the undying yearning for truly pure human connection in the void beyond the reach of society. Similarly, Mukdeeprom’s images are as gorgeous as they are surreal, bursting with color and dramatic lighting, changing the tone of the film on a dime (but always with purpose). And Costa’s work on Challengers may still be the editing feat of the year, but here he created a sense of true detachment from the real world. From the first shot to the last, everything plays out like a dream, a strange, hypnotic, ultimately significant dream we only fully grasp upon waking. And don’t get me started on the whimsical, haunting, sensual score — a stylistic 180 from Challengers that happens to be all the more intentional. “Pure Love” plays in my mind daily.

Many, many words later, and I feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface of Queer’s true intimate, romantic genius. It comes as no surprise that it is  an innately queer film — Guadagnino’s most unapologetically so yet — and every ounce of it is rooted in the psychology of the queer experience. I doubt that most can relate to being a lonely American expatriate in Mexico in the wake of World War II seeking fleeting gratification from the short-lived sexual encounters society affords you. Yet that sense of feeling like a stranger on the edge of the world, unknown to even yourself, left to make sense of your own desires with nowhere formal to turn, is one that many of us have experienced shades of before. As a result, who could blame Lee for choosing to banish all of the trauma, pain, insecurity, and uncertainty, and give himself over completely to love when a majority of us would be enticed to do the same? Nothing can hurt us beyond the physical realm, sheltered in a psychological manifestation of our desire of our own creation. Perhaps we don’t all have to take ayahuasca in the South American rainforest to find our true selves, but I am grateful Luca Guadagnino allowed somebody to do it. The revelations we receive as a result are of a quasi-divine ordination. It may be an otherworldly trip to hell and back, but by exorcising our deepest fears, we just might find pure bliss in the affection of another. Love is the ultimate savior and ultimate destroyer simultaneously. What could be more beautiful than experiencing that?

9/10