Queer draws us into Luca Guadagnino’s world of desire. It’s Mexico City in the Fifties, and we’ve settled among a collective of outcast American expats, moneyed enough that they can go in search of paradise. Sticky red motel corridors are brushed by the lights of neon signage, the air heavy with casual sex, which seems to rush by with an exhale of breath – intimate, explicit, but somehow elusive. Outside, the night sky looks like spilled ink, like it does in Douglas Sirk’s technicolour masterpieces of the midcentury.
Guadagnino has followed up this year’s triumphant tennis drama Challengers with a film that would seem miles apart, yet treats desire equally as a kind of supernatural possession. It’s often frightening in his work, because its victims are always left with their hearts exposed, an image he treats literally here as he did in his 2018 horror remake Suspiria, and its climactic display of a woman tearing open her own rib cage.
