Queer attracts us into Luca Guadagnino’s world of want. It’s Mexico Metropolis within the Fifties, and we’ve settled amongst a collective of outcast American expats, moneyed sufficient that they will go searching for paradise. Sticky pink motel corridors are brushed by the lights of neon signage, the air heavy with informal intercourse, which appears to hurry by with an exhale of breath – intimate, express, however by some means elusive. Exterior, the evening sky seems like spilled ink, prefer it does in Douglas Sirk’s technicolour masterpieces of the midcentury.

Guadagnino has adopted up this yr’s triumphant tennis drama Challengers with a movie that would appear miles aside, but treats want equally as a form of supernatural possession. It’s typically scary in his work, as a result of its victims are at all times left with their hearts uncovered, a picture he treats actually right here as he did in his 2018 horror remake Suspiria, and its climactic show of a girl tearing open her personal rib cage.

Queer’s panorama is unsettled but lovely; by way of it trudges Daniel Craig’s William Lee, alter ego of the postmodernist William S Burroughs, who wrote the movie’s supply novel. Lee has disassociated to the diploma that he’s began to fade from our view. The movie catches him disappearing like a picture into tv static. Guadagnino even throws within the odd, anachronistic monitor – Nirvana’s “Come as You Are”, or Radiohead’s “Discuss Present Host” – to echo his displacement. He’s within the fallacious time, within the fallacious place.

Burroughs wrote his novella in 1952, as an extension to his debut Junkie, and shortly after he’d shot lifeless his spouse Joan Vollmer, in what he’d come to say was an unintended discharge of his handgun. It’s a feverish, agonised doc of habit and abortive ardour, into which the director has weaved additional parts of the writer’s life.

“I’m not queer, I’m disembodied,” is the road repeatedly echoed throughout Queer, and largely by Craig’s protagonist. He’s wearing crisp linen, and makes niceties with the teasing, confrontational air of the actor’s Bond. But he carries with him a bitter dissatisfaction that threatens to puff him up like a balloon and, ultimately, pop, hastened when he encounters a younger American ex-serviceman, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). Starkey, a lead on Netflix’s Outer Banks, performs Allerton like a statue come to life. He’s Lee’s personal annoyed Pygmalion, who’s walked proper out of his fantasies however stays in the end unknowable. At instances, the movie layers photos, in order that Lee’s ghostly hand will stretch out to try to caress Allerton’s palms and ribs, to own him not directly.

They’ve intercourse. He invitations him on a visit to South America. Allerton holds him whereas he shivers and whimpers by way of heroin withdrawal. Lee is obsessed by the concept of telepathy, and leads the pair into the Ecuadorian jungle to hunt out a Dr Cotter. As performed by Lesley Manville in a greasy wig, blackened enamel, and with the hard-bitten supply of a saloon proprietor, she’s such a giddily unromantic character that it’s as if she’s the ultimate warning submit earlier than Lee is totally misplaced to his delusions. However he ignores her recommendation, takes “yagé” (in any other case often called ayahuasca), and Queer melts absolutely into the beat era realm of uncooked mythicism.

However its conclusion, in a means, echoes the ultimate scene of Guadagnino’s Name Me by Your Title (2017), which rests on Timothée Chalamet, eyes fastened on the fireside, cheeks moist and soul hole. As his character’s father has cautioned him, “Nature has crafty methods of discovering our weakest spot.” Queer seeks out that lonely place and lets us fester in it.

Dir: Luca Guadagnino. Starring: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Henrique Zaga, Lesley Manville. Cert 18, 137 minutes

‘Queer’ is in cinemas from 13 December