What to stream: Dive into Guadagnino’s world of cinematic intrigue
Italian director Luca Guadagnino has become an art house darling over the past 15 years, making films about desire, longing, relationships and identity that have resonated with audiences and catapulted his actors to superstardom. His latest film, Challengers is his biggest yet, starring Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor in a steamy tennis love triangle that plays out over the course of 13 years.
If Challengers piques your interest for more of Guadagnino’s signature sensual style, there’s more to discover in his oeuvre, so take a spin through his catalogue on streaming to dive into his world of international cinematic intrigue.
Guadagnino refers to three of his breakthrough films as his Desire Trilogy, which culminates with the 2017 film Call Me by Your Name, an adaptation of the Andre Aciman novel, which earned star Timothee Chalamet an Oscar nomination. The queer coming-of-age story was a sensation, debuting at Sundance and sending young audiences into a fervour, but it’s also a compelling family story and dreamy portrait of Italian vacation life.
Stream it on CBC Gem.
The previous installments in the Desire Trilogy were A Bigger Splash, Guadagnino’s 2015 riff on the 1969 film La Piscine, starring frequent collaborators Tilda Swinton and Dakota Johnson opposite Ralph Fiennes and Matthias Schoenaerts. Swinton stars as an ailing rock star whose Sardinian vacation is crashed by her ex and his daughter, resulting in an escalating tension and chaos. Rent it on digital platforms.
Swinton also starred in Guadagnino’s 2009 film I Am Love, about a woman who marries into a wealthy Milan family and has her senses awakened by a local chef. Stream it on Kanopy.
Guadagnino has also dabbled in horror, rendered in his own way, collaborating with screenwriter David Kajganich on the 2018 remake of the 1977 Italian giallo classic Suspiria. Starring Swinton and Johnson again, while the general plot points remain the same (a young American woman enrols at a dance school that turns out to be a secret coven of witches), Guadagnino and Kajganich adapt the setting to Berlin of 1977, the “German Autumn,” as a way to explore themes of postwar guilt and trauma. It’s a highly stylized and extremely disturbing affair.
Stream it on Prime Video.
The auteur explored the cannibalism subgenre in his 2022 film Bones and All, which was also written by Kajganich and adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis. Starring Chalamet and Taylor Russell, Bones and All follows a young couple travelling across the heartland of America in the 1980s as they contend with their taboo need to feast on human flesh. Stream it on Prime Video.
Guadagnino also created and directed the 2020 series We Are Who We Are, about a group of American teenagers living on an Italian military base. Stream it on Crave.
His first films The Protagonists (1999) and Melissa P. (2005) are not currently on streaming, nor is his documentary Bertolucci on Bertolucci (2013), but his 2020 documentary, Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, about Salvatore Ferragamo, is available to rent on digital platforms.