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Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Queer is not an adaptation of Naked Lunch: Luca Guadagnino’s film adapts William S. Burroughs’s novella Queer. But the title’s literary echoes are apt for a film that begins as an intimate portrait of longing in 1950s Mexico City and gradually slips into stranger, more hallucinatory territory. Daniel Craig gives its restless center a vivid, exposed presence; whether the film’s final movement deepens that portrait or loosens its emotional hold is the central question.
What is Queer about?
Craig plays William Lee, an American expatriate living in 1950s Mexico City. Lee is charming and abrasive, and his self-destructive habits sit alongside a conspicuous yearning for connection. He becomes fixated on Eugene Allerton, played by Drew Starkey, whose intermittent attention gives their relationship much of the film’s tension.
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The film’s first stretch is largely a character study shaped by that pursuit: Lee wants intimacy, but wanting it does not make him easy to be close to. Later, Lee and Allerton leave Mexico for a South American journey in search of a plant associated with telepathy. The story becomes more surreal and abstract, changing the terms of the film from a strained relationship drama to something harder to pin down.
Is Queer based on a book?
Yes. Guadagnino’s film adapts Burroughs’s novella Queer; A24’s production notes say Guadagnino optioned the novel for the screen. The film keeps Lee’s desire for connection at its center, while its later journey carries the story into more disorienting territory.
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Is Queer connected to Naked Lunch?
Not as an adaptation: the source text is Queer, not Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. The comparison is useful as literary and cinematic context, rather than as a description of the film’s source. The Boston Globe review invokes David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch and discusses the staging of the William Tell episode, one point where Guadagnino’s film can bring that other adaptation to mind.
Keeping the works distinct clarifies the appeal of the title’s “Naked Lunch” allusion: both films invite consideration of Burroughs’s unsettling imaginative world, but Guadagnino is adapting a different book and telling a story organized around Lee and Allerton’s relationship.
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Is Daniel Craig good in Queer?
Craig is the film’s most compelling reason to stay with Lee. He makes the character’s contradictions visible: Lee can be funny and abrasive, but his need for another person is not hidden behind those defenses. That emotional exposure gives the early sections their charge and helps make Lee more than a collection of destructive appetites.
Starkey’s Allerton occupies a more difficult position. His attention comes and goes, and the film’s emotional perspective stays close to Lee’s longing. That can make Allerton feel less fully developed than the person Lee desires; it also conveys the imbalance of the pursuit. The tension between those effects is part of the film’s portrait of desire, even if viewers may wish the relationship gave Allerton more independent weight.
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Does the surreal final movement work?
The South American section changes the film’s scale and texture. Its search for a plant associated with telepathy carries Lee and Allerton away from the Mexico City relationship drama and toward abstraction. The shift can be read as an extension of Lee’s attempt to reach beyond ordinary intimacy, but it also risks pulling attention from the emotional thread that has made the first part engaging.
The Associated Press review finds the handling of Burroughs’s wife Joan Vollmer’s death among the film’s less integrated elements. That criticism points to a real structural pressure: the final movement has to make its surreal material feel connected to Lee’s story, rather than simply append a different kind of film. The result is deliberately unsettled, but not every turn lands with the same emotional clarity as Craig’s performance.
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How long is Queer, and what is its US rating?
The Associated Press reports a runtime of 135 minutes and a US R rating for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, strong drug content, language, and brief violence. That rating describes the US release; classifications differ by country. The long runtime gives the film room to linger on Lee’s desire and drift into its later surreal passage, though the change in momentum may feel demanding to viewers expecting a tightly focused relationship drama.
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