Painful, Lonely Death – Luca Guagadino’s Queer is disturbingly real.

Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is a masticated portrait of queer middle age, an unnerving x-ray of loneliness, and a cinematic Hail Mary for life in death. With haunting precision, Guadagnino dissects the fragile interiority of his protagonist—a man trapped in the quicksand of unrequited love and existential dread.

The film lingers and masturbates in the quiet desperation of longing, portraying the ache of middle-aged queer existence as both deeply personal and achingly universal. Its intimate cinematography captures the protagonist’s fractured psyche, turning every glance, every unspoken word, into a reverberation of despair. Guadagnino’s ability to strip the story down to its raw emotional bones renders Queer a work of devastating clarity.

What sets the film apart is its refusal to romanticize suffering. Instead, it excavates the hidden debris of regret, failed connections, and unfulfilled desire, laying bare the unsettling truths of aging and yearning. The protagonist’s pursuit of love becomes a fragile act of rebellion against time, a futile attempt to rewrite the past while racing toward the inevitability of death.

The film magnified the protagonist’s queerness, but it was impossible to ignore how his whiteness shapes his isolation, framing it as a singular. The experience of queerness, as depicted in the film, often leaned into invisibility—unspoken desires, hidden longings, and the societal pressure to suppress.

By focusing intensely on middle-aged queer loneliness, Guadagnino creates a universal narrative of longing and despair, yet this universality feels incomplete, as it glosses over the intersectional struggles faced by queer individuals of color.

Race, though unspoken, lingers like a phantom presence in the film. For a Black queer protagonist, loneliness is not solely a product of unrequited love or internal alienation but also a byproduct of systemic exclusion—from predominantly white queer spaces, from societal acceptance, and even from cultural solidarity within their own communities. 

Queer was not an easy watch, but it was an essential one. It offered no comforting resolutions, only the stark beauty of vulnerability and a brutal honesty about the human condition. This is cinema that stays with you—gnawing at your thoughts long after the credits roll.