Lucio Castro on 'Drunken Noodles' and Personal Tragedy
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- "Drunken Noodles" follows newcomer Laith Khalifeh as art student Adnan across two discrete summers in NYC and upstate New York, with intimate and supernatural time-and-space-warping encounters with men including a DoorDash driver played by Joél Isaac.
- Lucio Castro based the film's central artist on real-life needlework "painter" Sal Salandra, whose homoerotic embroideries inspired several set pieces; Castro initially planned a documentary before pivoting to narrative, explaining "I'm more interested in lying about it, and the truth that comes from that."
- Castro cites Éric Rohmer's "Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle" as a primary reference and shot on digital in "the least romantic neighborhood in the world" — Williamsburg — with cinematographer Barton Cortright, using his own apartment as the artist's home set.
- "Drunken Noodles" premiered in the ACID section at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival (which IndieWire ranked among Cannes' best) and is now playing at NYC's IFC Center via Strand Releasing, with wider US expansion to follow.
- Castro's prior film "After His Death," an autumnal grief drama starring Mia Maestro and Lee Pace as an enigmatic cultlike musician, premiered at the 2025 Berlinale and has yet to secure Stateside distribution.
- Castro is returning to Argentina to shoot "by far my most personal film," inspired by the 1997 murder-suicide of his parents — a "big, tragic death" that occurred when he was around 21 — though he promises it will also be humorous and step outside a queer lens.
Why it matters: For queer cinema audiences starved of tender eroticism, "Drunken Noodles" arrives as one of the year's standout releases — IndieWire ranked it among Cannes' best and Letterboxd users compared it to "inland empire for twinks who refuse to get off of sniffies." Castro's theatrical expansion through Strand gives his deeply personal autobiographical Argentine project a built-in audience primed for the fatalistic streak running through all his work.
