Queen of Earth – Film Review by David Turpin

Directed by Alex Ross Perry

Starring –  Elisabeth Moss, Katherine Waterston, Patrick Fugit

On the strength of his preceding features, Impolex (2009), The Color Wheel (2011) and Listen Up Philip (2014), Alex Ross Perry has built up an intriguing position as one of American Independent cinema’s most self-contained new auteurs. From Impolex’s wilfully obtuse meandering to Listen Up Philip’s nuanced acidity, the films are admirably set apart from the prevailing trends of the moments at which they emerge. The same is equally true of Perry’s new film, Queen of Earth, which reunites him with Listen Up Philip star Elisabeth Moss for a forensic investigation of the psyches of two damaged women. The other woman in the equation is Katherine Waterston, who matches Moss scene-for- scene.

The set-up is elegantly simple. Catherine (Moss) and Virginia (Waterston) are old friends, on a week long retreat at an idyllic lake house. Since making a similar trip the previous year, their circumstances have changed, and Catherine – formerly the more collected – is now unravelling in the wake of the death of her father and the end of her relationship. As the week passes, Catherine’s fraying sanity leads to a series of ever-more-fraught confrontations, with the incisive wit of Perry’s previous features shading into something even more wounding.

Queen of Earth has most in common with a certain strain of late 1960s/early 1970s films, in which crumbling female psyches were forensically explored by (male) filmmakers. The urtext of the genre is Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), which Queen of Earth directly recalls with an almost unaccountably alarming sequence in which Catherine visualises a roomful of people aggressively hounding her. Like Repulsion, Queen of Earth trenchantly explores the intersection of sexual disgust and sexual desperation – particularly when Catherine delivers a stingingly unhinged indictment of male interloper Rich (Patrick Fugit).

The doubling of Catherine and Virginia – and the way in which they appear to be set, at least in Catherine’s mind, as reversible mirror images of one another – is clearly evocative of Bergman’s Persona (1966), although the combination of dreamy pastoralism and mounting unease is actually most redolent of José Ramón Larraz’s little-seen Symptoms (1974). Like that film, Queen of Earth pulls apart the strands of a female friendship at pitilessly close quarters, and with a sense of mounting dread. Unlike Symptoms, Queen of Earth never resolves into anything like a conventional psychological horror or suspense film. The tantalising quality of the film – the way it seems perpetually on the verge, so to speak – is its greatest demand, but also its greatest strength. The film is less interested in outright mania than it is in that quivering, unstable space on the borderline between sanity and insanity. Moss’s performance, as demanding to watch as the film itself, is a chilling exploration of the idea that what troubles us most about the so-called “insane” is not their madness, but their accusatory perception – the lucidity with which they perceive us from the outside.

Available to rent and buy from Monday 4th July with behind-the-scenes extras on We Are Colony