'Queer' Reviews: "Craig gives us a pinch of that glowering Burroughs DNA, but the trick of his performance, which is bold and funny and alive, is that he's playing the younger Burroughs, before he'd passed through the looking glass of cultivated insanity"

         At the 2024 Venice Film Festival, 'Queer' quickly garnered predominantly positive reviews from critics, not only establishing itself as an early award season contender but a score of 79% on Rotten Tomatoes. In the film, "In 1950s Mexico City, WILLIAM LEE, an American ex-pat in his late forties, leads a solitary life amidst a small American community. However, the arrival in town of EUGENE ALLERTON, a young student, stirs William into finally establishing a meaningful connection with someone." The ensemble cast includes Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, and Henry Zaga. But what did the critics say?

       Owen Gleiberman of Variety says, "Craig gives us a pinch of that glowering Burroughs DNA, but the trick of his performance, which is bold and funny and alive, is that he's playing the younger Burroughs, before he'd passed through the looking glass of cultivated insanity." Adding, "The last third of “Queer” may prove to be a challenge for audiences — much more so than the film’s explicit eroticism. Yet Luca Guadagino is telling a version of the same compelling story that he told in “Call Me by Your Name”: that of a queer love that, instead of delivering the salvation it promises, withers under the gaze of the real world. The film’s final shot is stunning. It shows that you after all the drugs, the warped crusades, the queerness he owned, the one thing William Burroughs could never figure out was how to heal his broken heart."

Photo by Christina DelliSante on Unsplash

         Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair writes, "Queer is meant to be prickly, withholding, enigmatic. To want anything more from it might simply be repeating Lee’s mistake, grasping for something that could never be ours." Continuing, "Queer is offbeat, abstract, erratic in mood and tempo—befitting an adaptation of Burroughs’s work. It can be a mean and off-putting film, though some of our revulsion is born of the horror of self recognition. To liven the mood, Guadagnino stages a few sex scenes that—when stripped of context, maybe—certainly qualify as hot. He uses anachronistic songs—there are two Nirvana covers, for example—to score scenes, alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pulsing, mechanical original compositions. The film is a riot of style and technique, growing ever more surreal as Lee chases after Gene, and after a validation that will never come."

       Ryan Lattanzio of indieWire notes, "Guadagnino wants not only to expand your consciousness as a moviegoer, but to cut you open and rearrange all the parts of you that see and feel things when you watch a film at all."

       Zhuo-Ning Su of Awards Daily praises the film, stating, "By turns sexy, heartbreaking, and extraordinarily trippy, the film mutates in front of our eyes in its exploration of this strange, strange thing called love... Queer is a triumph."