Earlier this year, acclaimed director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, Suspiria, Bones and All) teamed with scribe Justin Kuritzkes to unleash Challengers upon the world. A technically triumphant romantic drama driven by the leads of Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist, Challengers quickly established itself as the film to beat all the way back in April.
Whether or not it still holds that title is up for debate, but either way, Guadagnino and Kuritzkes could very much be in the process of upstaging themselves with Queer, the long-awaited, Daniel Craig-led historical romance film that just unearthed its first trailer, and it looks every bit as hypnotic as the names involved would suggest.
Based on the William S. Burroughs novel of the same name, the 1940s-set Queer stars Craig as William Lee, a man who has fled to Mexico City after evading capture during a drug bust in New Orleans. As he drifts through the city, surviving off of part-time jobs and military benefits, he encounters discharged Navy serviceman and drug user Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), and his infatuation with him blooms.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross also return from Challengers as Queer‘s composers, but you wouldn’t know it from the trailer. Where the duo tends to base their film scores in electronica, this first glimpse at Queer features a soft, acoustic drift that punctuates the film’s apparent interest in tenderness, redemption, and revolutionary — even mutinous — love. And yet, undertones of urgency abound, as they would for a queer man navigating 1940s Mexico City, let alone one who barely dodged the consequences of a drug bust.
Starring alongside Craig and Starkey are Jason Schwartzman, Lesley Manville (The Crown), and Henry Zaga (The New Mutants). Producing with Guadagnino himself is Lorenzo Mieli, who also served as a producer on Challengers. Cinematographer and frequent Guadagnino collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom is also on board, as especially indicated by the last couple of seconds of the trailer, which promises a film that’s as visually stunning an experience as the best of the best this year.
The film’s source material, published in 1985, was an extension of sorts to Burroughs’ 1953 novel Junkie, wherein the protagonist William (the same William played by Daniel Craig here) was navigating his addictions to morphine and heroine. Queer (the novel) follows the aftermath of William breaking away from drug use, and it looks as though a similar, if not identical, backstory has worked its way into the adaptation.
This is not the first time that Queer has been sought out for the big screen. Back in 2011, Oren Moverman (producer on The American Society of Magical Negroes) penned an adaptation of the novel that was due to be directed by Steve Buscemi. That production, of course, never got off the ground.
But this one did, and we’re going to go out on a limb and say it’s in far better hands with Guadagnino and his resident Avengers (sans Timothée Chalamet). And while it may be the job of trailers to make their subjects seem worthy of awards, the narrative promise that Queer has made here just might earn it a handful of nods in due time. But for now, all eyes are on the end of autumn for when Queer begins its limited theatrical run in the United States on Nov. 27.