Luca Guadagnino’s Queer

“Where’s the filth?” wonders Leonardo Goi at the Film Stage. “Rereading Queer on my way to Venice, I was stunned by the vividness of its stench and grime, so pervasive and persuasive I could sense the muck accumulating on my skin. Dirty as the novella was, Guadagnino’s adaptation feels almost antiseptic.”

Burroughs wrote Queer in the early 1950s during an especially miserable period in his life. While awaiting trial for the accidental killing of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer—it was not a William Tell act gone horribly wrong, Burroughs insisted; instead, he’d dropped his gun, it went off, and Vollmer was dead—he looked back a few years to days and nights spent in Mexico City, where he’d fled to escape sentencing in New Orleans for possession of illicit drugs and unregistered firearms.

Queer was intended to be less of a sequel to than a minor offshoot from Burroughs’s first novel, Junkie (1953), a semi-autobiographical account of his addiction to heroin and morphine. The hallucinatory tale is told in the first person by William Lee, credited on the cover of the mass-market paperback as the author. With Queer, Burroughs kept the name of his stand-in, switched to third-person narration, and dropped the veil of hallucination, leaving Lee—as everyone at his preferred hangout, the Ship Ahoy, calls him—exposed and raw. Burroughs set Queer aside before completing it and couldn’t bring himself to look at it again for decades until his agent had him brush it off for publication in 1985.

Guadagnino’s production designer, Stefano Baisi, built a late-1940s version of Mexico City on a lot at the famed Cinecittà Studios in Rome, and “to be fair,” writes Leonardo Goi, “Queer makes no mystery of its artificiality.” As Rolling Stone’s David Fear puts it, this is “a fantasy Mexico City one phallic statue away from going full Querelle.”

As Lee, Daniel Craig is “sensational in a role swimming in psychological complexity, which he marshals with rare intuition and grace,” writes Robbie Collin. “Lee is a self-styled flâneur, sauntering between bars in a white linen suit while projecting an air of casual self-amusement—but as his own insecurities come into focus, this carefully cultivated persona is revealed as a heartbreaking nervous tic. He uses the term queer with superficial pride—but the word is also often freighted with sadness and self-loathing; in one scene, he likens his sexuality to a hereditary disease.”

Writing for Time Out, Sophie Monks Kaufman finds Craig to be “phenomenal as a chewed-up charmer who delivers the novel’s loquacious prose with a relish that is part razzmatazz, part ruin.” Independently wealthy, Lee drinks, cruises, and hangs with his one true friend, Joe. “Played by an unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman, Joe could almost be an Allen Ginsberg surrogate, spinning low-key hilarious accounts of his sexual adventures,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “When a dalliance with a cop turns sour and he finds ‘El Puto Gringo’ scrawled on an exterior wall of his home, he shrugs, ‘I left it there. It pays to advertise.’”

One fine day, Lee locks eyes with Eugene Allerton, a sleek looker based on Adelbert Lewis Marker, the recently discharged Navy serviceman Burroughs fell in with in Mexico. Played by Drew Starkey, Gene is “a vision in cream and tawny, a sly knowing seeming to faintly dance across his handsome face,” writes Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. “His self-possession is painfully intriguing, as is the way he shifts between hot and cold when in Lee’s presence.”

“In terms of its eroticism, Queer is so hot to the touch that every scene feels slick with sweat,” writes Vulture’s Alison Willmore, “which makes it all the more perplexing that, emotionally, it feels sealed off.” There are “brief encounters with filmmakers Lisandro Alonso, David Lowery, and Ariel Schulman in what are essentially cameo roles,” and there’s a quest for yage, a drug with the potential for unleashing telepathic powers, that leads Lee and Gene to Ecuador and Dr. Cotter, played by a barely recognizable Lesley Manville.

“At one point,” writes Time’s Stephanie Zacharek, “in the middle of a heroin-induced reverie, Lee explains himself in a phrase that captures the universality of human longing and sexual desire, detached from that thing we conveniently call sexual orientation: ‘I’m not queer, I’m disembodied.’ And in that vein, Guadagnino has made a movie that feels strangely buoyant—as sexually explicit as it is, it’s almost more spiritually explicit.”

At the Film Verdict, Stephen Dalton finds that “Guadagnino has remixed an imperfect, incomplete book into an imperfect, incomplete film.” Queer screens next month as the Spotlight Gala presentation at the New York Film Festival before heading to festivals in Mill Valley and London and a theatrical release later this year from A24.