“A feverish, quietly sad exploration of longing and infatuation”

Just nine months after the triumphant Grand Slam of challengerDirector Luca Guadagnino is back again. Strange is a very different beast than his previous tennis-based ménage à trois: less straightforwardly entertaining, darker and more chaotic in its intentions and approach. But it has all its recurring themes and obsessions: sex and desire and longing and melancholy. It may also be almost too dazed for its own good.

challenger The writer Justin Kuritzkes reunites with his director to adapt the novella of the same name by the writer William S. Burroughs (free). Less subversive than Burroughs’ most famous work, Naked lunchIn the hands of Guadagnino and Kuritzkes, it becomes even more personal, leaning into the book’s autobiographical elements, an unorthodox homage to the Beat Generation hero.

Daniel Craig – who has eagerly distanced himself from Bond in every role he has taken on since hanging up his Walther PPK – is phenomenal as Burroughs’ replacement William Lee, an American expat in the gay cruising paradise of Mexico City . (Interestingly, the era’s homophobia exists only as background noise.) Although impeccably stylish in contemporary summer casual wear by costume designer Jonathan Anderson, Lee is awkward, vulnerable and boyish – traits that are only reinforced when he plays Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey). meets ), a handsome younger man. Their first encounter with the soundtrack to Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” – a pinprick of genius in more ways than one – is fraught with tension, and Lee subsequently pursues it with a hunger that turns to desperation. Allerton’s beauty and demeanor somehow throws Lee off; Guadagnino is adept at identifying tensions, sexual or otherwise, in these early encounters.

The film begins to unravel when they leave the safety of Mexico City and embark on an ill-advised trip to South America. Lee doesn’t seem to know where he stands with the enigmatic Allerton, and for a moment it feels like we as an audience don’t know either. The film sways on its own axis, its dreamlike blurriness almost overwhelming. To discover whether Allerton is truly queer, Lee travels to the jungles of Ecuador in search of the psychedelic drug ayahuasca, hoping to unlock the secrets of telepathy – an extreme reaction to what he perceives as the tyranny of private minds.

This hunt reaches a surreal climax with an unrecognizable, unforgettable performance from Lesley Manville as an eccentric shaman – insignificant in script time but great in impact. Those trippy third-act sequences in which the two men’s bodies literally merge before our eyes are eerie yet strangely moving, even heartbreaking. It feels like distilled Guadagnino: an erotic display of physical desires underscored by sadness. Strange may not be his best film, but it’s probably the best him.