Luca Guadagnino has already made one of the best movies of 2024. Soon, he’ll put out another. A24‘s Queer stars Daniel Craig as William Lee, an American ex-pat living in Mexico City who falls for a younger man named Eugene Allerton, played by Drew Starkey. They talk, they drink, they travel to South America to do drugs. With Eugene, William can be his own queer self.
You can watch the trailer for Queer (set to a cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies”) above.
Queer is based on the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name. Guadagnino explained why he wanted to adapt the book at the Venice Film Festival. “I was a lonely boy in Palermo, a megalomaniac and dreaming of building worlds through cinema. I read this slim book and I fell into the vivid imagination of this writer that I didn’t know at the time, the profound connection that he was achingly describing on the page between these two characters,” he said. “The romanticism of the idea of the adventure, and the adventure with someone you want and love, all of these really transformed me and changed me forever, and because I want to be loyal to that young boy, I kept thinking, I have to bring this to the screen.”
Here’s the official plot synopsis:
1950. William Lee, an American expat in Mexico City, spends his days almost entirely alone, except for a few contacts with other members of the small American community. His encounter with Eugene Allerton, an expat former soldier, new to the city, shows him, for the first time, that it might be finally possible to establish an intimate connection with somebody.
Queer, which was written by Justin Kuritzkes and also stars Lesley Manville, Jason Schwartzman, Henrique Zaga, and Omar Apollo, opens in theaters on November 27.