Director: Luca Guadagnino

Stars: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Henry Zaga, Lesley Manville

Following the kinetic thrill of ‘Challengers’ Guadagnino shifts to something more languid with this adaptation of William Burroughs’ novella. It is Mexico in the 1940s and louche writer Lee (Craig), having evaded police during a drugs bust, spends his days shooting up heroin and haunting the local bar, Ship Ahoy, with his main drinking partner, Jason Schwartman’s Ginsberg-like queen, Joe. One night in a bar he meets a handsome young man Eugene (the unfeasibly good looking Starkey) and Lee, who regards his homosexual leanings depraved, becomes infatuated with the newcomer who appears to have an unencumbered attitude to his own sexuality. Lee manages to persuade Eugene to join him on a trip to South America in a search for yage, a drug which Lee believes will imbue him with the power of telepathy. Once they have set off, the picture becomes a dark psychedelic screwball overextended comedy. Few would have expected a traditional narrative from a Burroughs’ adaptation, but for a story about addictions, this meandering tale fails to get under the skin, despite a gloriously horny but sympathetic Craig, replete with shabby and soiled white linen suits, as a man who is slave to his addictions. Production designer Stefano Baisi’s recreation of the Mexican 1940s demimonde, teeming with labyrinthine streets, is memorably scuzzy.

David Willoughby

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