Queer Review: Is Daniel Craig’s Boldest Performance Enough to Save This Slow-Burn?

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman

My Rating: 7.2/10 

The Verdict

Queer is an hallucinatory, heartbreaking, and intensely sexual odyssey, and while I found the pacing to be grueling at times, especially in the third act, Daniel Craig’s raw and vulnerable performance is excellent to watch.

The Full Review

Daniel Craig teaming up with the director of Call Me By Your Name to adapt William S. Burroughs' supposedly unfilmable novel was not on my bingo card - I was incredibly skeptical, and I kept asking how you take a sparse, gritty 1950s novella about unrequited lust and turn it into a cinematic event?

But after finally sitting through its nearly three-hour runtime I’m convinced that Queer is a film which will divide audiences for years to comea,

The Plot: A Boozy Exile

Set in 1950s Mexico City, Queer follows William Lee, played by Daniel Craig, an American expat living a life of perpetual intoxication, and I noticed the film captures the expat malaise perfectly, where days bleed into nights of tequila and cheap bars, and his life is upended when he meets Eugene Allerton, Drew Starkey’s younger student, who quickly becomes the object of Lee’s intense and agonizing obsession,

I did like how the film doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of Lee’s desperation, and I felt the first half of the movie, which focuses on the uneasy dance between the two men, was incredibly tense, with Guadagnino using the camera to linger on the smallest details, a hand on a glass, a look across a crowded room, in a way that makes you feel Lee’s yearning settle in your own chest,

Shedding the 007 Armor

Daniel Craig is the real highlight of Queer, and I believe this performance is his final bond with the Bond image, where he is sweaty, aging, and deeply uncool, and there is a bathroom scene I found particularly devastating, one that shows a level of vulnerability we rarely see from male stars of his caliber, because he isn’t playing a hero here, he’s playing a man hungry like a wolf, prowling bars for a connection he can’t quite grasp,

Drew Starkey, meanwhile, is the perfect blank slate, and he plays Eugene with a coldness which makes Lee’s obsession feel even more tragic, since you never quite know whether Eugene is a victim, a manipulator, or just a bored kid passing time.

I found their chemistry to be a slow burn which eventually explodes into some of the most explicit and artistically staged sex scenes of the decade,

The Trip to the Jungle

The third act is where the film takes a massive turn into the surreal as the characters travel to the Amazon in search of the psychedelic drug Yagé, also known as Ayahuasca,

I found this section of the film beautiful but deeply overindulgent, and I noticed that the pacing, which was already slow, nearly ground to a halt, and while the visual effects, including an interpretive dance where the actors’ bodies appear to merge, are undeniably world-class, I felt the emotional connection was lost amid the hallucination sequences,

The “Double Exposure” Trick

I want to highlight the work of cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, whose dreamlike textures will be familiar if you’ve seen Suspiria, and in Queer you will notice a recurring use of double exposure, where a second spectral arm or body is layered over Daniel Craig’s performance,

This is a physical manifestation of Lee’s longing, where his heart is literally reaching out to touch Allerton before his body has the courage to do so, and the use of miniatures, those unrealistic dollhouse-style sets, further emphasizes that we are trapped inside Lee’s distorted and drug-addled mind,

Soundtrack Analysis: From Nirvana to Prince

The score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is predictably moody, but it was the licensed music that really caught my ear, and I was genuinely shocked by how well Nirvana’s Come as You Are fit a 1950s period piece,

Guadagnino uses modern music tells us that Lee’s pain is universal and timeless, and when Sinéad O’Connor’s cover of All Apologies plays over the line “everyone is gay,” it felt like a bold and almost confrontational choice, one that bridges the gap between the 1950s setting and a 2026 audience, reminding us that the struggle for self-acceptance hasn’t changed as much as we like to think,

Queer vs. Call Me By Your Name

Comparing this to Guadagnino’s other queer landmark, Call Me By Your Name was a sun-drenched romantic fantasy, Queer feels like its dark and bruised shadow, and I believe Queer is the more honest film, because it deals with the parts of our history, shame, age gaps, addiction, which CMBYN largely polished away,

In my view, if you want a first love movie you return to Elio and Oliver, but if you want a last love movie, one that understands the slow grind of loneliness, Queer is the superior, if more difficult, experience,

Queer Ending Explained: The Ouroboros and the Ghost (SPOILERS)

The final thirty minutes are what confuse most viewers, and after their trip in the jungle Lee and Allerton share a telepathic moment where Allerton says he is not queer but disembodied, which I interpreted as Eugene finally admitting that he cannot love Lee in the way Lee needs,

I was struck by the time-jump epilogue, where we see an elderly Lee back in Mexico City, still haunted by the ghost of Allerton, and the recurring image of the Ouroboros, a snake eating its tail, represents Lee’s vicious cycle.

He is trapped in an endless loop of searching for a love that doesn’t exist, and I felt the final shot, Lee dying alone while imagining Eugene holding him, was Guadagnino’s way of showing that for some people the dream of love is the only thing that makes a repressive life bearable,

Queer Movie Frequently Asked Questions

Is Queer a “Happy Ending” movie? 

Absolutely not, as this is a tragic study of obsession and addiction,

Where can I stream Queer? 

As of January 2026 you can stream it on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video,

What does the centipede mean? 

Guadagnino has stated that the centipede represents repression, and it functions as the villain of the movie, the internal fear which keeps Lee from being truly free,

What is the age rating? 

It is a hard NC-17, or 18 in the UK, and I should warn readers that it contains very graphic sexual content and depictions of heroin use,

How long is the movie? 

The runtime is two hours and thirty-one minutes, and I felt it could have been about twenty minutes shorter, specifically in the jungle sequence.