Art student Adnan has moved to New York City, where he is house-sitting in his uncle’s apartment and undertaking an internship at a local gallery. With food delivery and sex both readily available via app, Adnan enters an erotic world of late-night encounters. Slowly, the film draws us back into the past, moving upstate to reveal more about its characters and their relationships.

Carefully composed in the Academy Ratio, New York-based Argentine director Lucio Castro’s third feature returns to the time-shifting queer gaze of his debut, End of the Century (2019), crafting a mysterious exploration of desire, delivered with the lightness of a lazy summer afternoon sliding into evening. Part art-world portrait (featuring intricate, explicit needlepoint tableaux from artist Sal Salandra), part occluded character study, and punctuated with understated elements of magic realism, Drunken Noodles reflects the modern need to connect.