From Luca Guadagnino (Challengers, Call Me by Your Name) comes a story of a cosmic and precarious love between two American expats in midcentury Mexico City. Based on William S. Burroughs’ unfinished novel, written between 1951 and 1953, and published in 1985, Queer stars Daniel Craig as Burroughs’ fictional alter ego William Lee, who falls in love with the coy and curious Oklahoma student Eugene Allerton, played by Drew Starkey (Outer Banks), while wrestling with transgressions past and present in self-imposed exile.
Reuniting with Guadagnino following their GRAMMY®-nominated collaboration on Challengers, two-time Academy Award-winning composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross deliver a lushly evocative score that builds alongside the evolving onscreen drama. Inspired by Burroughs’ cut-up literary technique, the composers utilized sampled instrumentation to create a recurring palette of gauzy, ethereal solo piano and woodwind orchestrations that continue to intensify into a final fevered pitch of electronic synths and Motorik-tinged textures.
One of the film’s key musical moments and a thematic throughline for the score is main love theme “Pure Love,” a dreamlike composition of piano and strings that echoes the tender romanticism between the two main characters. The intimately moving number appears in various reincarnations throughout the film, with Reznor and Ross resampling and processing the original cue with tonal and textural shifts that add new layers of meaning to the deepening relationship onscreen.
The film culminates with “Vaster Than Empires,” an original end credits song written by Reznor and Ross and performed by legendary Brazilian composer and singer Caetano Veloso. Featuring lyrics lifted directly from Burroughs’ final diary entry, the track is a fitting end cap to both the film and score itself, its aching poignancy building layer-by-layer throughout each new verse.
