Queer Ending Explained: What Happens to Lee and Eugene Allerton?

Spoilers for Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 film Queer. Lee and Eugene Allerton’s journey to find yage brings them together physically but does not resolve their emotional mismatch. After Eugene says he is not queer, Lee loses him in the jungle; two years later, he learns Eugene has gone to South America. The final hotel sequence turns that separation into a surreal image of Lee’s grief and fixation.

What happens to Lee and Eugene at the end of Queer?

Lee (Daniel Craig) and Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) travel into the Ecuadorian jungle to meet Dr. Cotter and take yage, also known as ayahuasca. During the trip, Eugene tells Lee that he is not queer. The experience does not bring them into alignment: on the return journey, Lee loses Eugene in the jungle.

#	Preview	Product	Price
1		Queer [Blu-ray]	$19.29	Buy on Amazon
2		Queer Japan [Blu-ray]	$21.20	Buy on Amazon
3		Queer Blu-ray | Daniel Craig	$21.32	Buy on Amazon
4		Pride [BLU_RAY]	$12.56	Buy on Amazon
5		Queers [Blu-ray]	$26.78	Buy on Amazon

Two years later, Lee hears from Joe that Eugene has gone to South America to work as a tour guide for an Army colonel. The film does not show a reunion or establish what Eugene feels about Lee after leaving. What Lee receives instead is news that Eugene has moved on with his life.

What does the final hotel-room sequence mean?

The film shifts into a dreamlike hotel-room sequence tied to Lee’s earlier encounter with Eugene. Lee sees a miniature version of himself in a dollhouse, an ouroboros—a snake eating its own tail—and Eugene wearing his centipede necklace. In the sequence’s climactic, William Tell-like image, Lee shoots Eugene.

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TIME’s Barry Levitt reads the scene as Lee’s grief and self-destructive repetition, rather than a literal account of events after the jungle. In that interpretation, the dollhouse takes Lee back mentally to a time before his attachment to Eugene; it does not erase the relationship. The ouroboros evokes a cycle of life, death and rebirth, while the snake’s tear suggests Lee’s grief. Eugene’s moving centipede, by contrast, can suggest that he continues onward. These are readings of the film’s deliberately surreal imagery, not explanations confirmed as the only meaning.

The centipede and repression

One symbol has a direct explanation from Guadagnino: the director said, “The centipede is the villain in the movie.” In TIME’s interview, he connected it to repression. The necklace therefore carries more than a reminder of Eugene for Lee; it also points toward the force the film associates with what is suppressed.

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The William Tell image and Burroughs’s history

The shooting image invokes William S. Burroughs’s real-life killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City during a drunken William Tell game. The film’s scene is part of a surreal, shifting sequence; it should not be mistaken for a literal reenactment or for something Lee does in the film’s ordinary timeline.

Why doesn’t the yage trip bring them together?

The trip gives Lee and Eugene a shared destination, not shared feelings. Eugene’s statement that he is not queer makes their mismatch explicit, and the later separation leaves Lee without the connection he hoped the journey might deliver. TIME’s account of Guadagnino’s comments frames the film around whether people are ready for connection and what prevents it. Because Eugene’s inner life remains less fully explained than Lee’s, the ending does not warrant a definitive diagnosis of his sexuality beyond what he tells Lee.

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Guadagnino described the film as more than a simple unrequited-love story. In a December 17, 2024 interview with QX Magazine, he said: “I wasn’t interested in telling a story of unrequited love. This is a universal story about love, and the way in which people can reciprocate love or the tragedy of not being in the same place at the same time.” That idea fits an ending in which Lee’s longing is clear, but the two men are not emotionally in the same place.

How the film changes Burroughs’s novella

The 2024 film adapts William S. Burroughs’s novella Queer, but its completed jungle trip and final stretch go beyond the source story. Guadagnino said he and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes developed a third act in the spirit of Burroughs: in the novella, Lee and Allerton meet Dr. Cotter but do not get the yage they seek. The filmmakers explored what might happen if they did. The film’s yage trip and its aftermath are therefore additions, not a conclusion found in the novella.

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For readers comparing the two, the useful distinction is that Burroughs’s novella supplies the characters and premise, while the film constructs its own ending around the trip, separation and Lee’s symbolic return to Eugene.

Quick Recap

Bestseller No. 1

Queer [Blu-ray]

Blu Ray

$19.29

Bestseller No. 2

Queer Japan [Blu-ray]

Queer Japan

$21.20

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Queer Blu-ray | Daniel Craig

Daniel Craig, Daan de Wit, Jason Schwartzman

$21.32

Bestseller No. 4

Pride [BLU_RAY]

Film

$12.56

Bestseller No. 5

Queers [Blu-ray]

$26.78

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Queers [Blu-ray]

$26.78

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