Queer review: Lavishly imaginative, humidly erotic

William S. Burroughs’ short, semi-autobiographical novel Queer is stark, grimy and rough at the edges — not terms you’d generally apply to the work of Italian director Luca Guadagnino, one of the lushest sensualists working in the movies today. Yet the marriage of their authorial sensibilities proves an exciting one in this sprawling, lavishly imaginative, humidly erotic adaptation.

Guadagnino’s first overtly queer-themed film since 2017’s Call Me by Your Name is an exploration of gay desire both unfulfilled and run riot, recalling Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle in its vision of a heightened world where every building, every garment, every whisky glass is charged with sexual possibility.

It also gives Daniel Craig his most adventurous role since his pre-Bond days, reminding us of the unguarded character actor that has always resided in that action-man body. Shaggy and dissolute and clad in a stained cream linen suit, he’s at once repellent and magnetic as Burroughs’ alter ego Lee, an expat American living a kind of suspended reality in Mexico City after the Second World War, his life a winding trail of dive bars, drug trips and one-night stands in unmade beds.

His routine is disrupted by an encounter with Allerton (a superb Drew Starkey), a young, coolly handsome and sexually ambiguous ex-Navy man. Lee is swiftly, all-consumingly, fixated on him; Allerton neither reciprocates nor entirely rebuffs the older man’s advances. Amid the film’s surreally stylised flourishes, its depiction of toxically imbalanced queer desire is entirely recognisable.

That their hot-and-cold relationship culminates in an Amazonian ayahuasca quest is typical of the absurdist comedy that accompanies the film’s anguished melancholy throughout. It’s a film as mercurial and seductive as Allerton himself, finally moving in its examination of a gay man whose most constant companion is his own loneliness. Burroughs’ book is bitter provocation; Guadagnino’s interpretation arguably gives it a heart and breaks it. 

Queer hits UK cinemas on 13 December 2025