Queer: 'ill-disciplined' Daniel Craig drama fails to take off

Daniel Craig delivers possibly the finest performance of his career in one of his "least interesting and most ill-disciplined movies" to date – and that includes "Cowboys & Aliens", said Kevin Maher in The Times.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino ("Challengers", "Call Me by Your Name"), "Queer" is an adaptation of the "patchy, repetitive, quasi-autobiographical" novella by Beat Generation icon William S. Burroughs.

'Difficult to care about any of it'

Craig plays a writer named William Lee – "a heroin-addicted barfly with a sweaty side-parting and randy yearning for the handsome young American men who patronise the Ship Ahoy saloon in mid-1950s Mexico City". It's a performance of "beguiling intensity", and the film is certainly "visually appealing": Guadagnino "does not make ugly films". But it never really takes off; in fact, "it's difficult to convey" just how little, "dramatically speaking", happens in the movie.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Guadagnino has said that he wanted to make a "universal story about love", said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture, but "Queer" is really just "a series of eccentric, mildly funny vignettes that aren't really connected to each other, and which involve various self-indulgent characters we hardly know". Craig is "touchingly vulnerable" as the ageing writer, but "it's difficult to care about any of it", least of all the love story that develops when he becomes fixated on a young American (Drew Starkey).

'Unapologetically romantic'

The source material is arguably limited, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. Burroughs's 1985 novella may come across as "blunt and gauche" to readers today, but I found Guadagnino's "unapologetically romantic" take on it "soul-swellingly lush and allusive". This is a "beautiful film about male loneliness, and the way a solitary life can so easily shade into a life sentence".