'Daniel Craig's Queer is the anti-Call Me By Your Name'

Coming off the back of Challengers, director Luca Guadagnino has never been more in demand. It's no wonder then that Queer, his new movie starring Daniel Craig, might just be his most anticipated film to date. It also doesn't hurt that the film is extremely horny.

Just when you thought all that three-way tonsil tennis in Challengers might be the pinnacle of sexy cinema, along comes Guadagnino again with a project slutty enough to even make the peach blush in Call Me By Your Name.

Warning: if you don't want to know anything about the plot of Queer, leave now.

Queer follows Daniel Craig's disheveled "queer", William Lee, who wanders from bar to bar in Mexico City on the prowl for sex and something deeper. There, he becomes infatuated with a beguiling twink named Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a discharged American Navy serviceman whose flirty blue eyes promise an oasis of hope for Lee in the dusty alleys of Mexico's sweaty capital.

But this mystery dreamboat also hangs out with a female friend at the bar they all frequent, reminiscent of the three-way tug that pulls at the heart of Challengers. While that's not as central to the story this time around, many threads like this from Guadagnino's wider filmography do echo in Queer.

Lee's desperate need to connect with another person, to no longer feel so alone, brings to mind Tilda Swinton's protagonist in A Bigger Splash who's recovering from throat surgery and physically can't speak. Queer's fixation on the human form is a somewhat less gruesome evolution of the hunger Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet's characters feel for each other in Bones and All, which descends into a primal, hallucinatory dance of the flesh at the end, calling back to the rhythm of body horror that Suspiria wound through its twisty narrative.

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But on the surface, Queer actually seems most akin to Call Me By Your Name, Guadagnino's signature film about the romance that develops between 17-year-old Elio, 24 year old Oliver, and of course, that peach (age unknown).

Because when Lee first notices Eugene (at a cockfight, of all places), something stirs in him just like it did when Oliver first strolled into Elio's Italian summer home. And when Eugene notices Lee back, Daniel Craig's character becomes shy and coy, even boyish in his affection, which is no small feat in that muscular, 56-year-old frame of his.

Lee is the eldest of the two, yet he's very much the Elio in this scenario. Except, that youthful energy takes a feverish, even forceful tone when Lee finally gets what he wants, seducing an intoxicated Eugene over some cheap brandy in his home. What happens next is one of the most explicit gay encounters you'll ever see in a mainstream film, if Queer can be described as such. And the same is true for another hookup that takes place earlier when Lee gives oral sex to a stranger played by the singer Omar Apollo.

It's a far cry from Call Me By Your Name where Guadagnino pans away from Elio and Oliver just as they start to go at it, choosing to settle the camera on rustling trees rather than the couple. Since then, plenty of detractors have lamented this decision and what it says about depicting gay sex on screen, although Guadagnino has always pushed back, arguing that this is a narrow view of what the film aims to achieve in his eyes.

Seven years on, Guadagnino surprisingly responds to the backlash again, this time in Queer when he playfully pans to a window again during the film's raunchiest sex scenes. But each time he does, the camera then smash-cuts back to the boys where they're smashing each other even harder than before. Elio and Oliver could never.

This isn't as petty as it sounds though, because the focus on sex here, in contrast to the absence of sex in Call Me By Your Name, is actually a very deliberate juxtaposition. Because Elio and Oliver love each other so deeply, Guadagnino chooses to give them the privacy they crave in an intimate world of their own making.

But in Queer, Lee isn't anywhere near as intimate with the men he sleeps with, not on an emotional level, no matter how much he might want to be.

Some critics have claimed that Craig's chemistry with Starkey is off, that there's a disconnect in their scenes together. But that's the whole point, the entire thrust of the film (so to speak). Because even when Eugene gives into desire, he's not infatuated in the same way that Lee is.

He grows bored quickly, to the point where Lee must essentially bribe him into sex with a travel pact. And without spoiling too much, a drug-fuelled revelation at the end tears them even further apart, even when they've never been closer in a physical sense.

Elio and Oliver don't stay together either, and it's a good thing too because if they had, we'd never get to hear Michael Stuhlbarg's speech or see Chalamet become a star before our eyes as his own eyes tear up by that fireplace at the end. But theirs was a love that burned too bright and too fast, whereas the connection between Lee and Eugene in Queer can hardly be described as love at all.

While both films explore desire in a specifically queer way, what Lee feels for Eugene is almost entirely one-sided. Because Eugene is practically ethereal in that regard, always out of reach even when he's in Lee's arms (or Lee is in him). Queer couldn't be more different to Call Me By Your Name in that sense, beyond the sex or overriding queerness of it all.

So once the kisses have been kissed and the bangs have been banged, don't go into Guadagnino's latest expecting Call Me By Your Name part 2.

Queer premieres in cinemas on Friday, 13 December.