Queer review: Daniel Craig is fully committed in Luca Guadagnino's meandering adaptation

Craig plays William Lee, the alter-ego of the author, living in Mexico City, where he spends most of his life frequenting gay bars with names like Ship Ahoy and Lola’s.

As becomes clear, Lee lives across the border because in America homosexuality is illegal. His proclivities are a "curse", he says.

Hanging out with various reprobates, he drinks, smokes and looks for casual sexual gratification wherever he can, with the structure of the film very episodic in its first third. It’s not until the arrival of the handsome young man, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) that he sharpens his focus, initially uncertain if the lad is "queer" or not.

Hoping to strike up a relationship of sorts, the two eventually fall into bed after a night’s drinking and, in Allerton’s case, being sick. "Do I smell like vomit?" he asks, as they’re about to kiss.

While Craig is seen grabbing at his co-star's boxer shorts, that's about as raunchy as Queer gets. It’s largely quite coy when it comes to sex, at least in that scene, with the camera gazing out of the window on the neon-lit street below.

Rather, Guadagnino and his screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (who penned the director’s recent mainstream, tennis-themed hit Challengers) get more amped up as Lee falls increasingly addicted to narcotics.

Asking Allerton to accompany him to South America, the mission is to find Yage, a plant said to increase telepathic sensitivity according to a magazine article Lee has read. Better known these days as ayahuasca, "it is a mirror" onto oneself, Lee is told, which can only mean one thing: he's going to take it.

When he and Allerton arrive in the jungle, they find Alice Cochran (Lesley Manville), a botanist with long, lank black hair and a wicked smile. It’s a great transformation for the demure British actress, every bit as convincing as her wild matriarch in 2020 Kevin Costner vehicle Let Him Go.

The whole sequence begins with the two men attacked by a vicious-looking viper, which Alice controls like a shaman, and gets weirder from here on, the moment Lee and Allerton consume Yage.

There are some lovely details, like the Sloth hanging out in her shack, but watching two men get high isn’t overly interesting. Think naked torsos and shots of their bodies literally fusing (realised with some great visual effects). The trouble is, much like Challengers, Guadagnino doesn’t show a lot of restraint, and the trip sequence drags on and on.

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Much better is an earlier nightmare, involving a disembodied figure, which only lasts a few seconds and yet makes a much greater impact.

Craig is fully committed to the role, and he’s surrounded by some fine actors, including a barely recognisable Jason Schwartzman, saddled with a beard, sandals and heavy girth, as one of Lee’s cronies.

The soundtrack also has its moments, especially the use of Nirvana’s Come As You Are (a cover of All Apologies also accompanies the opening credits).

Technically, it’s well-crafted, especially immersing viewers back into 1950s Latin America. But its meandering nature means that Queer has to work hard to keep our attention, something it fails to do as it rolls into an epilogue that should be more poignant than it is.

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