Queer (2024): Desire as the Only Religion

The Story

William Lee (Craig) — Burroughs's alter ego — drifts through 1950s Mexico City, an American expatriate living on a small income, drinking, using heroin, in the bars and cafes frequented by the American colony. He becomes obsessed with a younger American, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) — cool, beautiful, not cruel but not warm, available in certain ways and completely withheld in others.

Their relationship — if it can be called that — is the film's core: a sustained, humiliating negotiation in which Lee offers everything and Allerton accepts what he wants of it without reciprocating the feeling. They travel together, to seek out a hallucinogenic drug called Yage that Lee believes can produce telepathic connection. What they find is not telepathy.

Daniel Craig

Craig is fifty-six in Queer, and Guadagnino does not hide this. Lee's body — its age, its needs, its vulnerability — is part of the film's visual argument. Desire does not have an age limit. Longing does not become more dignified with the years. Craig plays Lee as a man for whom desire is the only animating force remaining, the one thing that makes the days worth inhabiting, and he plays this without vanity and without self-pity.

His physical performance — the way Lee holds himself in Allerton's presence, the quality of his attention, the effort of the performance he is putting on for someone who may not be watching — is extraordinary. It is also, in its complete honesty about the body of a man who is aging and still wanting, among the most radical gay performances in recent cinema.

Guadagnino's Visual Language

Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom — who also shot Call Me by Your Name — build a visual world from 1950s Mexico City that is simultaneously period-authentic and completely contemporary in feeling: the colours, the architecture, the bars at night, the quality of desire in the air of a city that is foreign to everyone in it.

The film uses a visual grammar that is specific to Guadagnino's late work: close attention to bodies and surfaces, a refusal to cut away from the moments that other directors would shorten, the sense that the camera is not observing desire but participating in it. This is the director who made Call Me by Your Name and has continued thinking about the same questions — what does desire look like from the inside? what does the camera do to it? — for the intervening years.

The Dream Sequences

The film's late sequences — the hallucinogenic ones, the ones that dissolve the boundary between what Lee wants and what is actually happening — are among Guadagnino's most formally daring work. They use the vocabulary of the dream to express what realism cannot quite contain: the full force of Lee's longing, its quality of madness, the way desire at its most intense becomes indistinguishable from hallucination.

Burroughs understood this. His prose style — the cut-up technique he developed, the fragmentation of coherent narrative — was itself a formal expression of the way desire destabilises perception. Guadagnino finds a cinematic equivalent.

Drew Starkey

Starkey has the harder role: to play Allerton as genuinely attractive to both Lee and the viewer without making him simply available, without making his withholding cruel. He manages this by playing Allerton's own interiority as genuinely opaque — we do not fully know what Allerton feels, and the film does not pretend to know.

This opacity is the right choice. Lee's obsession requires an object that cannot be fully resolved, because obsession is not about knowledge but about the absence of it.

The Burroughs Question

Burroughs is not a comfortable figure. His accidental killing of his wife is not a footnote. The novella itself is an act of processing that tragedy — Lee's inability to connect, his desperate seeking of a bond that might relieve his isolation, his use of drugs and sex as approaches to a connection he cannot achieve — is inseparable from Burroughs's own guilt and grief.

Guadagnino does not ignore this context. He holds it in the background of the film, present in Craig's performance of a man who is carrying something heavy and unnamed, in the quality of Lee's seeking that feels driven by more than ordinary loneliness.

Why It Matters for BoysDo

BoysDo is a platform that believes gay desire deserves the full resources of serious filmmaking. *Queer* is that argument at its most extreme: a film that takes obsessive, asymmetric, aging, drug-addled gay desire and makes it beautiful, makes it the subject of Guadagnino's full visual intelligence, refuses to apologise for a single moment of it.

It is the most recent film on this list and among the most radical. The tradition it belongs to — Genet, Fassbinder, the full lineage of cinema that refused to make gay desire palatable — runs directly to this film, and the film knows it.

Desire as the only religion. Craig as its faithful and ravaged practitioner. The camera, as always, paying full attention.