It’s been quite a prolific year for Luca Guadagnino. After the strike-delayed Challengers finally arrived in April, he embarked on production on After the Hunt this summer all while readying his William S. Burroughs adaptation Queer for a fall festival premiere. Led by Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Henry Zaga, and Lesley Manville, the film finally picked up distribution from A24, who will roll it out in theaters beginning November 27. Ahead of the release, the first trailer has now arrived.
Leonardo Goi said in his review, “Where’s the filth? I wrote down the question on page two of my notes, roughly about when Queer entered its second chapter, sending Lee (Daniel Craig) and his young lover Eugene (Drew Starkey) on a quest for ayahuasca in South America. Having spent the first section tracking Lee as he fritters time away in Mexico City, drinking and flirting and sleeping with fellow drifters in neon-soaked motels, this is when the film should get sweatier, dirtier, trippier––long, long before the couple has its first taste of yagé. It’s a chapter that promises to unleash all the pent-up carnality Queer had accrued in its opening scenes. And sure enough, the two men sweat profusely, the journey gets more and more surreal, but the drug-induced paranoias and voracious sex exude the same quality they did in the first segment: a plastic, stylized artificiality. Guadagnino’s brand of sensualism has always courted a certain stilted-ness; even at their horniest, his films always struck me as oddly chaste, the works of a choreographer as opposed to a filmmaker. So again: where’s the filth?”
See the trailer and a trio of posters below.
