There was a lot of anticipation for Luca Guadagnino’s new film. The director from Palermo, after all, is one of the most acclaimed names in contemporary cinema and his works, from “Call Me By Your Name” to “Challengers”, from “Bones and All” to “Suspiria”, have always been able to get people talking about them, for better or worse. And “Queer” will also be a big talk, the latest film by the Italian director competing at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, which was born as an adaptation of the second novel by William Burroughs, which changed the director’s life after he read it at 17.

It will do so because “Queer” is the strangest film seen so far at the film festival, because it has literally shocked everyone and because it is so unconventional, crazy and alienating that no one has been able to fully decipher it, finding themselves with the strange sensation of having witnessed more of a hallucination than a real film.

It’s 1950. William Lee is an American living in Mexico City. He spends his days almost entirely alone and has a strong addiction to drugs. His encounter with Eugene Allerton, a young student who has just arrived in the city, shows him for the first time the possibility of finally establishing an intimate connection with someone. But this unrequited gay relationship will lead him adrift.

“Queer” is not a canonical film and there is no doubt about it. It does not follow a linear plot, its characters do not evolve but degenerate and the thread of the discourse is continually interrupted, mixed up and embellished with splatter moments, long erotic scenes, strange events that make the narration really difficult for an audience that expects at least a minimum of clarity and communication from cinema.

There is sex, drugs, human weakness in “Queer” which, more than talking about homosexual love, talks about unrequited love, loneliness, dependence, obsession.

Guadagnino’s film makes chaos its essence, madness its mantra, the portrait of human degradation its greatest pride. And so the story gets lost in a crazy tale that satisfies the director’s heart more than that of the audience.

“Queer”, as explained by Guadagnino himself, aims to make the audience reflect on who men are when they are alone with themselves. Too bad that watching the film it is impossible to decipher it.

Guadagnino made a misstep with “Queer”, he was not very altruistic with an audience that expects from cinema stories, characters and tales that are understandable, clear and capable of giving emotions. With Queer, no matter how much you can embroider on it, all this does not happen.

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