Queer by Luca Guadagnino

Adapting a William Burroughs book to the screen is a daring and challenging undertaking. And it seems Luca Guadagnino, after his worldwide commercial successes, felt ready to diverge from his recent path and take on the ambition of a difficult, highly auteur-driven and deeply personal film that he had dreamed of bringing to the screen since he first read the book at 17.

This project is a bold personal gamble that aspires to be a masterpiece, yet may have ultimately slipped through his fingers. Due to its density and fragmentation, it resists easy interpretation. It is up to each viewer to experience and decide whether it truly convinces.

The story follows Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical book, in which William Lee, the author’s alter ego, takes refuge in Mexico City during the 1950s, drifting from bar to bar in search of homosexual lovers, casual sex, and escape through alcohol and drugs. His life changes when he meets a young man new to the city, Eugene Allerton, with whom he falls in love. Lee ends up in an unbalanced relationship with him and offers, for a fee, to join him on a journey to South America in search of a plant rumoured to enable telepathy.

At the story’s core is the theme of incompleteness and yearning, expressed through obsessive, unreciprocated passion. This feeling is mainly pursued through control and financial compensation, remaining elusive and destructive yet undeniably rooted in love. William Lee, tormented by lust, uses his refined eloquence to approach, captivate, and win over Eugene, all while secretly longing for a connection without words—purely based on intuition and telepathy. He yearns for a soul language that transcends language itself, revealing the true essence of the desire that binds them and, ultimately, healing the pain that comes with seeing and feeling too much.

The film’s structure is clear: three distinct parts, each progressively abstract. The first, set in a reconstructed Mexico City, is the most grounded—psychological, narrative-driven, formally precise. The second transitions into a destabilised, drug-infused road trip. The third is pure dissolution: a quiet, luminous coda where form, colour, and silence replace language entirely.

The first section, built entirely at Cinecittà and through CGI, recreates a stylised Mexico City, a synthetic postcard that intentionally rejects realism. Within this space, the film introduces the codes of William and Eugene’s dynamic. Guadagnino handles this stretch with confidence—observational, formally rigorous, at times withholding. The tone is detached but never cold. There is precision in the way looks, gestures, and proximity are charged with tension.

The second act—set in South America—breaks away from linearity. It moves into allegory, hallucination, and metaphor. Narrative coherence gives way to repetition, loops, delays. Guadagnino uses this stretch to disorient. Certain sequences feel self-referential, bordering on performative abstraction. There’s clear ambition here—to evoke a kind of cinematic cut-up method, reflecting Burroughs’ literary technique. But the risk is that meaning begins to dissolve too early, too often.

In the epilogue (no spoilers), the film reorients. William, now old and dying, lies on a bed surrounded by shifting, magmatic light. It echoes the sepia tones of the opening credits, now turned vivid. The symbolism is clear but not forced: this light, memory, and colour marks the return of Eugene—less as a person than as a sensation. Guadagnino likely built this final image around the last words Burroughs wrote in his journal before his death in 1997: “Love? What is it? The most natural painkiller there is. LOVE.” Or perhaps even the closing line of The Western Lands: “The old writer couldn’t write anymore because he had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words.”

This film is more than an adaptation of Queer. It compresses decades of Burroughs’ writing into a single trajectory. Though the original novel was written in 1951 and only published in 1985, Guadagnino treats it as a container for the author’s entire mythology—obsession, language, pain, exile, and silence. The film absorbs it all and repurposes it through a contemporary lens.

With a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes (Challengers) and realised with Guadagnino’s usual team—Sayombhu Mukdeeprom on cinematography, Marco Costa on editing, Stefano Baisi on set design, Jonathan Anderson on costumes, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on music—the film is ambitious in scope and construction. Its reported €50 million budget is visible on screen, yet it never falls into spectacle. The attention remains internal. It is a film about texture, rhythm, perception.

Some sequences stand out: the fading split body of William reaching out for Eugene, the distorted lysergic embrace that leans into horror, the extended slow-motion tableaux that stretch time and sensation. The sex scenes—precise, charged, emotionally explicit—are striking, and it’s a shame that many were cut. Guadagnino’s original three-and-a-half-hour cut was reportedly reduced to 2 hours and 15 minutes, which still feels dense but perhaps not as immersive as it could have been.

The soundtrack plays an essential role. Using modern music in a period setting risks dissonance, but here it works. The film opens with Sinéad O’Connor’s cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” moves through “Come As You Are” in slow motion, features New Order’s “Leave Me Alone,” Prince, and three appearances by the Italian band Verdena. This approach blurs time, unhooks the film from its era, and links it instead to a psychological space—where past, memory, and present overlap.

The more one unpacks it, the more Queer reveals itself as a cerebral and conceptual object—closer to a moving installation than conventional narrative cinema. There is something compelling in Guadagnino’s decision to adapt not just the content of Burroughs’ work, but also its form and structure—imperfectly, intuitively, and at times frustratingly. Yet there’s a difference between making an experimental film and watching one. That difference can be jarring.

Kuritzkes said he was surprised, when rereading Queer, to find a straightforward love story. Perhaps we expected the film to lean more into that clarity—to trust the simplicity of feeling, without filtering it through so many layers of disorientation. Instead, Guadagnino pushes towards opacity, as if determined to get lost on purpose.

It is a personal film. A mirror, not a window. Guadagnino projects his references, his taste, his cinematic and literary obsessions, then tries to stretch beyond them—further and further—until what’s left is only reflection. But that reflection is unstable. It moves. It refracts. It confuses.

Like the drug William Lee seeks in the jungle—and is warned about—this film is “a mirror, not a portal,” and you might not like what you see.