TORONTO, Canada—Heady, consuming, obsessive love is Luca Guadagnino’s specialty, and he plumbs it once more with Queer, an adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ 1985 novel about an American junkie in 1940s Mexico City who falls hard for a younger stranger.

Hallucinatory and grimy, the Call Me by Your Name and Challengers director’s latest is a romance set inside an addiction nightmare, and at its core is Daniel Craig, delivering a fearsomely raw, vulnerable turn as a man who’s lost and alone, split into pieces, and gripped by a hunger he can’t control. The film may be as fragmented as its protagonist and, ultimately, unable to reconcile its disparate facets, but its headliner’s portrait of desire, degradation, and delirium is a sight to behold—and the performance of his career.

William Lee (Craig) is a dashing mess from the moment we meet him questioning a potential paramour. “You’re a queer?” are his initial words and a sign of the war raging inside him, since Lee likes to deny that he’s a homosexual and yet lives as an out-and-unashamed one.

Dressed in a stylish white suit, snappy hat, and clear prescription glasses, a gun holstered on his hip, he’s an expat who moves through his adopted metropolis like a native. In a later monologue, Lee will more fully voice his conflicted feelings about his gay “condition.” However, from the start, he radiates a mixture of confidence and reticence, brashness and shame, and walking through the streets, his life changes when he spies a group of men cheering on a cockfight and, just past them, a........

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