Queer

Queer (2024) comes from William S. Burroughs's short novel of the same name. An American living in Mexico City in the 1950s becomes fixated on a much younger American. The second half goes somewhere else entirely as the two of them travel into South America looking for ayahuasca. Burroughs wrote the novel in 1952 and it went unpublished until 1985. The text is directly autobiographical and about desire that is not returned. Luca Guadagnino directed. Daniel Craig plays Lee, and it is the sharpest turn of his post Bond career: a man who is fragile, drunk and continually refused. It was shot in Rome at Cinecittà, where 1950s Mexico City was built. The film does not disguise this; the artificiality of the setting is deliberate. The score is by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, alongside songs deliberately chosen from the wrong decades. It played in competition at Venice. It runs 138 minutes. Good for: Burroughs, formally risky films, and an unexpected side of Daniel Craig. Less good for: the third section abandons narrative altogether and becomes hallucination, and many viewers lose it there. Drug use and sex are explicit. The story does not advance so much as repeat.