Film reviews: Queer | The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

Not even an on-form Daniel Craig can save Luca Guadagnino’s ostentatious adaptation of William S Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel, writes Alistair Harkness

Daniel Craig in Queer | Mubi

Queer (18) ★★

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (12A) ★★

Not so much as a departure as a return to the sort of arty, edgy films he did before James Bond made him a megastar, Daniel Craig’s performance in Queer is an ongoing reminder of the versatility he’s always had as an actor. It’s too bad, then, that Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of debauched Beat writer William S Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel (written in the 1950s, but not published until the 1980s) is so shallow and lacking in any real chemistry between the leads.

That’s not Craig’s fault. Cast as Burroughs’ alter ego William Lee, he really leans into the role of a craggy-faced junkie on the prowl for carnal pleasure amid the licentious ex-pat community of 1950s’ Mexico City. Transforming himself with Andy Warhol nerd glasses, sashaying gait, greasy hair and crumpled linen suit, he brings a wounded, almost pitiful vulnerability to his ageing Lothario, whose carrying of a pistol, forever holstered on his hip, is a blatant signifier of his pathetic need to over-compensate for his diminishing sexual potency in the world.

But the film’s mad-about-the-boy plot, which sees Lee becomes obsessed with a much younger man whose sexuality he can’t quite determine, is undermined by Guadagnino’s casting of Drew Starkey as Lee’s object of lust, Eugene Allerton. Blandly handsome and aloof, it’s hard to get a read on what exactly Allerton has that holds Lee in his grip, beyond, perhaps, the rather boring implication that he’s simply a physical stand-in for a junkie’s need to constantly chase the unattainable rush of a first high, which drains some of the intended eroticism from the film’s explicit sex scenes.

Coming off the back of Guadagnino’s taut tennis hit Challengers, Queer also sees the Italian director back in the ostentatious, loosey-goosey mode of I Am Love and A Bigger Splash. Alas, while his heightened, studio-bound recreation of the era is aesthetically pleasing (he filmed Mexico City on the backlots of Rome’s Cinecittà Studios), a lot of the film also feels very sophomoric.

His anachronistic use of Nirvana on the soundtrack, for instance, makes sense given Kurt Cobain’s own collaboration with William Burroughs on 1993’s spoken-word recording The Priest They Called Him, but in Guadagnino’s hands Cobain’s gay-positive lyrics and fateful obsession with guns is used more dully to underscore not just Burroughs’ own unapologetic homosexuality, but the violent mythology he perpetuated about himself.

Then there’s the film’s third act decampment to South America, where Lee and Allerton go on a quest to track down a hallucinogenic drug with rumoured telepathic properties, something Lee desperately hopes will end his own sense of emotional isolation. Replete with comically naff CGI snakes, interpretative dance sequences and a wild cameo from Lesley Manville as a basket-case botanist, it’s trippy yet tedious and only serves to lessen the impact of the Louis Buñuel inspired fever-dream flourish with which Guadagnino brings the film to a close. In such moments the film matches the poignancy of Craig’s performance, but they’re too few and far between.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim | Warner Bros, New Line Cinema

With Amazon blowing a billion dollars on a Lord of the Rings streaming show that barely anyone talks about, the latest big screen outing drawn from JRR Tolkien’s books feels similarly inessential — one for dedicated fans, rather than casual viewers who got swept up in Peter Jackson’s original trilogy 20 years ago.

An epic hand-drawn anime adventure set 200 years before those films, Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim tells the origins story of Helm’s Deep via a faux feminist story of a young princess called Hèra (voiced by Gaia Wise) who becomes a warrior when her all-powerful father, Helm Hammerhand (a cheque-cashing Brian Cox), inadvertently starts a war with a vengeance-seeking childhood friend of Hèra’s whose father he accidentally kills.

References to what’s to come abound, but the story at hand is pretty boilerplate and the animation doesn’t really open up the world in meaningful or exciting way.

Both films in cinemas from 13 December