In 2024, Luca Guadagnino—the director who gifted the world the sun-drenched, sensual fever dream of Call Me By Your Name —returned to the theme of longing with Queer . But where Elio and Oliver’s love bloomed under the Italian summer sun, Queer festers and glows in the dark, neon-lit underbelly of 1950s Mexico City. Based on William S. Burroughs’ seminal, semi-autobiographical novella (written in 1953 but not published until 1985), Queer is not a romance. It is an autopsy of desire, an exploration of addiction, and a dizzying, hallucinatory plunge into the terrifying vulnerability of wanting to be seen. A Portrait of the Junkie as a Young(ish) Man The film stars Drew Starkey (in a breathtaking, star-making performance) as William Lee, a thinly veiled stand-in for Burroughs himself. Lee is an American expatriate, a heroin addict living in a squalid rented room, drifting through the cantinas and cheap bars of Mexico City. He is a man existing in a state of emotional novocaine—numbed by opiates, sharpened by wit, and utterly detached from the world around him.
Queer is a film about the impossibility of connection and the beautiful, pathetic, noble stupidity of chasing it anyway. It is a requiem for everyone who has ever loved someone who didn’t love them back, and a haunting reminder that the most terrifying drug isn't found in the jungle—it's hope. Movie Queer
That is until he sees Eugene Allerton (a perfectly cast Josh O’Connor). Allerton is a young, handsome, newly discharged Navy soldier, exuding a maddening, untouchable calm. For Lee, this isn’t a crush; it’s a seismic rupture. The film masterfully captures the specific agony of queer desire in an era of brutal repression: the furtive glances, the strategic seating in bars, the coded language, and the terrifying gamble of a proposition. Guadagnino films Lee’s obsession with the claustrophobic intensity of a horror movie. Every time Lee watches Allerton across a smoky room, the air feels thick with the potential for both ecstasy and humiliation. What makes Queer extraordinary is its refusal to offer easy catharsis. Allerton is not a romantic hero; he is a cipher. He accepts Lee’s money, his drinks, his company, and even his bed, but he remains emotionally absent. O’Connor plays Allerton with an infuriating passivity, a blank canvas onto which Lee projects his every fantasy. This dynamic is painfully accurate: the desperate lover trying to purchase intimacy, and the object of affection who is curious, perhaps flattered, but ultimately unreachable. In 2024, Luca Guadagnino—the director who gifted the
The film’s first half is a masterclass in tension. A legendary sequence involving a desperate, failed attempt at telepathy (a literalization of Lee’s wish to penetrate Allerton’s mind) is both absurd and heartbreaking. The sex scenes, when they come, are not romantic. They are awkward, transactional, and shot with a gritty realism that strips away any Hollywood gloss. This is not love; it is two drowning people clinging to the same piece of wreckage. Then, Queer pulls the rug out. Shifting from social realism to psychedelic allegory, Lee convinces Allerton to join him on a journey deep into the South American jungle to find a mythical drug called Yage (ayahuasca). This second half is pure Burroughs: visceral, bizarre, and hallucinatory. Lee is an American expatriate, a heroin addict