“Castro explores the realities of queer life with delicacy and honesty.”

In a festival with so much curation as the New York Film Festival, where each day brings dozens of new discoveries, small and quiet films often risk being overlooked. Yet it’s in these smaller and quieter works that some of the truest voices are often found. Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles, playing in the festival’s Currents section, is one such film.  It’s a modest, beautiful, and humane work that continues the director’s fascination with time, love, and the fragile, circular nature of memory.

This is Castro’s second feature, following End of the Century, a film that was striking for its elliptical storytelling and delicate balance of time and space. If that earlier film recalled the structured stillness of an Angela Schanelec work, quiet films built around moments that seem to stretch outside of time, Drunken Noodles takes that foundation and makes it freer and looser. It sheds some of the strict geometry of his debut but gains something warmer and more immediate, a sense of intimacy that deepens Castro’s preoccupation with the intersections of queerness and memories that link people together across time.

The film unfolds across four segments, all told out of order. The first segment introduces Adnan (Laith Khalifeh), a Bard student who is spending the summer in New York City taking care of a family member’s apartment and cat while interning at an art gallery. Khalifeh’s performance is magnetic. His expressions, his eyes especially, communicate a sense of distance and solitude even in the most intimate moments. Adnan is a young man who is observant and searching, almost as if he’s waiting for his own story to begin yet being very deep into his life. It’s during this summer that he meets Yariel (Joel Isaac), a food deliverer, and the two quickly form a connection. What begins as a brief, awkward conversation at a city park grows into a friendship, and perhaps a romance, though Castro remains nuanced. The two grow closer through small gestures, sharing meals and time, and eventually through sex that becomes increasingly complicated and experimental. Their encounters, including group scenes with Yariel’s friends, are shot with honesty and without moral judgment. They feel less about transgression and more about trying to feel alive and together.

The second section moves back in time. Adnan, bicycling through the forested backroads of upstate New York, gets a flat tire and meets Sal (Ezriel Kornel), an older man who offers to help him fix it. The encounter is gentle and slow. They talk about art and about loss. Sal tells him of his late partner, and together they wander through the woods, enjoying the quiet and the stillness of the world around them. This section is inspired by the real-life artist Sal Salandra, whose work Castro discovered before making the film. Like his real counterpart, Sal is an older man who creates needlepoint scenes that are overtly sexual and full of fantasy. The art, and Sal himself, blur the line between fantasy and memory and between what is imagined and what is lived. This idea becomes one of the film’s main themes of the spaces where sexual fantasy and reality coexist.

The third segment takes place earlier still, when Adnan is in a relationship with his boyfriend Iggie (Matthew Risch). The two are visiting a vacation house in the same upstate region, hoping to enjoy the time together and relax. They hike through forests, swim in rivers and waterfalls, and sit together by the water. Their relationship is fragile; the tension of routine and familiarity has dulled the warmth of their love. There’s still care between them, but the intimacy has faded. Their sex life has slowed, and the stillness of the countryside seems to expose the quiet distance growing between them. Adnan takes his bicycle for a ride, a small decision that will lead to the chance meeting with Sal. Castro connects these segments like experiences that fold in on one another and presents time not as a straight line but as a series of overlapping memories.

The fourth segment returns forward in time to New York, where the art gallery is hosting an exhibition of Sal’s work. Adnan watches the gallery with Iggie and the two speak briefly. There’s no anger, only acknowledgment. They share a quick, longing hug and part ways. It’s simple and understated, and it feels like the right kind of ending for a film about gay relationships. 

A final section follows. Adnan walks through a cruising park. As he walks, time once again dissolves. He might be dreaming, or remembering, or stepping into another version of his life altogether, as he teleports to a different dimension. Castro leaves the moment unresolved and suspended, like memory and dreams.

Throughout the film, Castro explores the realities of queer life with delicacy and honesty. The film is about love and sex, but also about friendship, loneliness, and the difficulty of building lasting relationships in a world that often misunderstands or dismisses them. In the first section, the intensity of desire is at its strongest; in the second, affection becomes an exchange of wisdom; in the third, love begins to cool; in the fourth, it transforms into memory. What connects all of these parts is Adnan’s search for meaning and stability, a desire to understand whether love must always burn to be real, or whether it can survive in gentleness and with someone who will care for you even though the sexual passion has dimmed.

In one small but piercing moment, Adnan is asked by the gallery director how he knows Sal. He pauses before answering, “I met him upstate.” It’s a simple line, but Castro holds it long enough with much truthfulness. The vagueness of that answer feels familiar, especially for gay men who often must choose how much truth to share about their relationships in spaces that can still judge them. The moment of choosing discretion and of masking in plain sight, is one of the film’s most profound moments.

The film also draws inspiration from the poetry of Li Bai, the Tang Dynasty poet whose verses celebrated friendship, solitude, and nature. Drunken Noodles carries this same complexity.  It’s a film about being alive, vibrant, but also about messy, unsteady, and complex human emotions. Castro’s imagery of forests, rivers, and parks isn’t simply decorative. Nature becomes the setting where love and loneliness coexist, where one can be surrounded by beauty yet still feel profoundly alone, even among friends.

If End of the Century was Castro’s reflection on time and destiny, Drunken Noodles feels like his film of life: lived, felt, uncertain. It’s about the moments that don’t have closure, about the friends and lovers who drift in and out of our lives, and about how memory holds them all. There is no judgment in his gaze, only empathy, truth, and the complexity of gay relationships. Drunken Noodles is a film that asks us to look more closely at ourselves, at others, and at the quiet moments. It is tender, introspective, and deeply sincere. For Castro, this is a mature and beautiful work; a film of subtle revelation and lasting memories.