Screening Date: 13 November 2025
Screening Time: 7 pm
Release Date: 2024
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Country: Italy / USA
Running Time: 137 mins
Rating: R 18+
Language: English & Spanish (with English subtitles)
A fever-dream period romance set in the oppressive heat of 1950s Mexico City, Queer follows dissolute American expat William Lee (Daniel Craig) as he becomes spellbound by a handsome young GI, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). What begins as a drunken infatuation curdles into obsession, dragging them through dive bars, cockfights and — finally — deep into the Ecuadorian jungle in search of a mind-bending yagé that might fuse bodies as easily as it shatters them. Guadagnino’s camera lingers on sweat-slick linen and neon-bled nights, conjuring a love story equal parts erotic and elegiac.
It’s always dicey when a literary cult text meets an A-list star; you can’t help wondering if the grit will survive the glamour. Will Craig’s Bond-era sheen dull Burroughs’s raw nerve? Will hallucinatory excess drown out heartbreak? In this case, thrillingly not. Guadagnino shoots on gauzy 16 mm, then blows it up to shimmering widescreen, letting scratches and colour-bleed mirror Lee’s drug-hazed perception. When financing ran dry, the director finished key dream sequences using hand-held Bolex cameras and borrowed jungle gear, turning constraint into queasy intimacy.
More than a retro kink piece, Queer interrogates the colonial gaze, loneliness and the high cost of wanting someone who can’t (or won’t) want you back. By the hallucinatory finale, Craig’s William staggers through equal measures of shame, desire and fleeting bliss, leaving the audience as punch-drunk as its anti-hero.
“Viscous, decadent, and unexpectedly tender — a toxic love letter that refuses to dry on the page.” – Vulture
