The Brooklyn Rail

In her celestial 2017 single “It’s Okay to Cry,” producer/songwriter SOPHIE warbles “I never thought I’d see you cry / Just know whatever hurts, it’s all mine,” an acceptance of her friend or lover for exactly who they are, even for the attributes they fear, covet, and despise. Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, Queer (2024), approaches the lyric’s conceit literally. In Queer, the protagonist wants to physically inhabit his lover’s body, mind, and soul to see their shared life as his emotionally distant lover sees it. Here, the “whatever hurts” slices deeper than flesh wounds—“whatever hurts” are festering repressed truths, undeniably endemic to who we are but ugly to the point that we shelter them from all but those closest to us. Or especially from those closest to us.

Queer is an adaptation of two William S. Burroughs texts, and like the avant-garde dissonance of SOPHIE’s subgenre, hyperpop, Burroughs’s literature (alongside his psychedelic experimental contemporaries like Ken Kesey and Aldous Huxley) plumbs the human condition with aesthetic cacophony and disorientation. Guadagnino’s gradual pacing, engrossing atmosphere, and palpable loneliness pair effectively with Burroughs’s hallucinatory imagery and (to borrow from Burroughs scholar Jamie Russell) “sensory derangement.”

The film, set in late 1940s Mexico, centers around the relationship between American expats William Lee (Daniel Craig) and Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Lee’s desire for romantic companionship amidst an endless sea of one-night stands is at odds with Allerton’s detached persona, a dynamic that wavers and contorts as Lee chips at their boundaries. The couple then journey through Central and South America, first to fuel Lee’s worsening heroin addiction and then to find ayahuasca in the Amazon rainforest, which Lee believes will induce telepathy.

Daniel Craig is at his most powerfully understated in Queer, telegraphing Lee’s foresakenness, self-loathing, and fears of mortality with a gradually disintegrating stoic façade. Drew Starkey plays Allerton with compelling restraint—the film is entirely from Lee’s perspective, deliberately leaving Allerton’s feelings towards Lee ambiguous without feeling underdeveloped. The physicality of their performances cannot be understated, with Craig convincingly carrying the weight of Lee's age, addictions, and repressions, and Starkey commanding the camera while slipping into shadows between street lamps.

In the film’s third act, Guadagnino visualizes this hallucinogenic agglutination of bodies and souls in all its grizzly glory. Hands reach and clutch beneath skin, liquifying into a writhing, wrestling muscle mass. Appendages glow. Faces sink into chests. It is at once nauseating and sublime watching the pair’s mangled bodies wrestling with agony and ecstasy, melding like a sculptor’s fingers pressing into clay. For contemporary body horror aficionados, the film intrigues as a hybridization of Burroughs’s prose from the sixties; the grotesqueries of filmmakers like David Cronenberg who were inspired by (and also directly adapted) Burroughs’s imagery; and Guadagnino’s own liminal, unsettling imagery, reminiscent of Edward Hopper, René Magritte, and George Tooker. Of 2024’s proliferation of body horror films, from Jane Schoenbrun’s analog psychological thriller I Saw the TV Glow to Coralie Fargeat’s horror-comedy The Substance, Guadagnino’s use of this imagery in Queer is the most direct timeline of the art form: it is an early-period work of body horror, true sensory derangement, through a twenty-first-century auteur’s lens.

Guadagnino balances the film’s unsightly scenes with incisive, melancholic imagery and sound. Allerton sports a disturbingly naturalistic centipede necklace, whose mandibles gently tickle his throat. An abrasive, overwhelming hiss of a television’s static punctuates and reflects Lee’s nerves. The film’s most memorable imagery manifests in cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and editor Marco Costa’s ephemeral yet enduring visualization of the repeated exchange between Lee and Allerton: “I’m not queer; I’m disembodied,” an adage whose meaning deepens significantly as the film unfolds, using superimpositions. When Lee and Allerton go to a screening of Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, for instance, Costa layers two shots of the couple. In one, Lee and Allerton are equally invested in the film. In the other, Lee slowly turns towards Allerton. As the first-shot version of Lee continues to watch the film, the other hesitantly reaches out his ghostly hand towards Allerton’s sharp contour, stopping just short of caressing his cheek. This moment is as breathtaking as it is fleeting, a heartbreaking depiction of Lee’s romantic feelings towards Allerton, which he is forced to conceal and protect against both masculine surliness and societal homophobia. Costa echoes this motif throughout Queer, imbuing the film with a spectral undercurrent that further disorients viewers by visualizing and sundering a character’s desires from their outcome.

Queer masterfully harnesses “sense derangement,” alongside a pair of fine performances, gorgeous cinematography, and masterful editing, to cultivate a painfully tangible embodiment of the terrifying, exhilarating desire to know someone beyond covert, delicious longing, illicit moonlit sex, or even companionship.