Film Review - Queer (2024)
There is nothing dangerous about this film. That’s the problem.
Queer arrives dressed in reverence, begging to be called bold. It is not. It’s beautiful, yes. Meticulously lit. Gossamered in longing. But the moment it starts, you know what kind of queerness you’re being offered. The clean kind. The distant kind. The kind a straight man can watch and still feel safe.
Luca Guadagnino's adaptation of Burroughs' novella strips the story of its grime and guts. In place of the original’s frayed paranoia and bruised eroticism, we’re given Daniel Craig, brooding behind sunglasses, wandering through a Mexico so stylised it stops breathing. He plays Lee like a ghost with a good skincare routine. The obsession he feels for Allerton (Drew Starkey) is bloodless, low-stakes, and slow. So slow it feels like a eulogy for something the director never knew.
Desire, in this film, is decoration. The kind that matches the curtains.
Watching it, I kept thinking: this isn’t my queer. This isn’t anyone’s queer. This is a version built for film festivals and polite conversations at dinner parties. It's Burroughs defanged. Sanitised. Queerness without the sweat. Without the shame. Without the risk.
Back in 1994, I was twenty-three, living in a sharehouse in Surry Hills with three other queers. Tony, a gorgeous Englishman I pined for quietly, and a lesbian couple, Erin and Leilani. Erin was a cop. Leilani worked corporate. The year before, Leilani had been the poster girl for the Mardi Gras Festival. All pride, all presence. Everyone knew her. Everyone loved her. But not enough, apparently.
One night Erin brought her colleagues over. She introduced Leilani as a friend. A flatmate. Played it safe. Smiled the kind of smile that queer people wear like bulletproof vests.
Leilani stayed quiet. Until she didn’t.
After dinner was served, she walked into the lounge room and served something else. A container of used syringes — ours, from the weekends we all spent charging through Oxford Street on speed and adrenaline. She slammed it down on the table and said, “You want to play straight? Fine. But don’t you dare erase me.”
Erin kept her job. She lost her girlfriend.
That was queerness. Not cinematic. Not pretty. Just real. Messy. Compromised. Burning with the need to be seen and the fear of what visibility might cost.
Queer avoids that fire entirely. It presents obsession as something aesthetic, passive. But obsession is never passive. It's ugly. It claws. It consumes. I once followed a man from Sydney to Wollongong just to watch him kiss someone else. I sat outside the bar until he left with him. That was obsession. Not Craig in linen, frowning at the ocean.
This film reduces queerness to choreography. Every glance rehearsed, every silence intentional, every gesture sterile. There’s no urgency. No sweat. No one looks like they’ve fucked, or cried after, or begged someone to stay while pretending they didn't care.
There’s one moment, late in the film, where Lee speaks of desire like it’s a riddle. As if wanting someone were too complex to name. But we’ve never needed metaphors. We’ve needed mirrors.
This isn’t a mirror. It’s a museum piece.
A film that dares to be called Queer should do more than gesture. It should risk something. It should ache. It should ruin its actors a little. It should offend. It should haunt. Instead, this one flatters itself with restraint.
Queerness is not restraint. It is rupture.
This film gave me none of it.
It gave me shadows without heat.
It gave me longing without touch.
It gave me Daniel Craig trying not to sweat.
And I left the cinema thinking of Leilani. Of how she refused to be edited out of her own life. How she turned truth into confrontation. How she made silence bleed.
That’s the kind of queer story I want.
The kind this film was too scared to tell.