Cannes Review: Drunken Noodles is a Sultry and Strangely Calming Drama

The laws of time and space are met with frisky ambivalence in Drunken Noodles, Lucio Castro’s anticipated third feature and surely the hottest title in this year’s ACID lineup. Most people familiar with the New York-based, Argentinian-born director first encountered him through End of the Century, a film of similar temporal disregard: set in Barcelona, […] The post Cannes Review: Drunken Noodles is a Sultry and Strangely Calming Drama first appeared on The Film Stage.

May 18, 2025 - 21:35

Cannes Review: Drunken Noodles is a Sultry and Strangely Calming Drama

The laws of time and space are met with frisky ambivalence in Drunken Noodles, Lucio Castro’s anticipated third feature and surely the hottest title in this year’s ACID lineup. Most people familiar with the New York-based, Argentinian-born director first encountered him through End of the Century, a film of similar temporal disregard: set in Barcelona, it followed two men who seemed to fall in love only to realize it wasn’t their first encounter. Upon release in 2019, critics were divided over some of the film’s more adventurous flourishes––the sense of overreach. There are a handful of moments in Noodles that do something similar, but it’s an otherwise sultry and strangely calming film, 82 minutes of late-night hookups and late-season ennui that passes like a summer breeze.

Newcomer Laith Khalifeh stars as Adnan, an art student and new arrival in New York. His plans are to spend the summer interning at an art gallery, cat-sitting in his uncle’s spacious Brooklyn apartment, and cruising in McCarren Park. Castro splits the narrative between three of Adnan’s romantic partners: firstly a delivery driver, Yariel (Joel Isaac), in what seems the present tense; then a flashback to an encounter with a reclusive artist, Sal (Ezriel Kornel), whose work is on display at Adnan’s internship; and finally a getaway with a former lover, Iggie (Matthew Risch), in a sylvan retreat somewhere upstate. Castro positions the second of these as Drunken Noodles‘ emotional wellspring and one of Adnan’s core memories: a formative sexual encounter with a much older man that not only leads to the job in New York but seemingly fullfills a childhood fantasy. Castro takes this mood of interconnectivity to form a kind of narrative Möbius strip.

According to the director, Kornel’s character was inspired by Sal Salandra, a septuagenarian embroiderer known for playful, colourful depictions of queer orgies and hook-up culture––a surreal, celebratory style that the film chases as a kind of central thesis. Some of Salandra’s work is on display in the opening third, and Castro even includes a short but erudite critique issued by Yariel to fellow delivery drivers in a scene that felt just a little too close to patronizing. The group then show up to Adnan’s for an orgy, which Castro has filmed in some lovely frozen vistas, similar to recreations of artistic tableaux in João Pedro Rodrigues’s Will-o’-the-Wisp. Castro takes his taste for experimentation one further in the next act, with Adnan and Sal encountering a horny Mr. Tumnus in the woods; he proceeds to pleasure himself with a ruby slipper and flute. If that sounds like a lot it’s because it sort of is, a flight of fancy so indulgent that it temporarily breaks the film’s otherwise well rounded spell.

Not that it should detract from how beautifully captured that scene (and most everything else) is. Before seeing the film, my ears had pricked up that cinematographer Barton Cortright, an artist of hypnotic sterility––notably Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral and Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed––was behind the camera. Cortright goes another direction with Drunken Noodles, luxuriating among sultry shadows and natural light in a way that is somewhat less novel but undoubtedly beautiful throughout. The music, a synthy soundscape by Castro’s usual collaborator Roberto Lombardo, perfectly complements the listlessness and humidity of New York’s late-summer evenings. Castro caps it off with a closing mystery, albeit one that doesn’t stay in the bloodstream too long. This is a film in which to relax.

Drunken Noodles premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

The post Cannes Review: Drunken Noodles is a Sultry and Strangely Calming Drama first appeared on The Film Stage.