Queen of Earth

Queen of Earth is a character study of a depressed woman who unravels following death, scandal, and a break-up. She spends a week at a high end lake side house belonging to a friend.

The visit, which should have been a calm, nurturing respite from her personal tragedies turns into a gut wrenching week. Her friend lacks the patience and empathy to help her heal. Instead she pushes her further into depression and decompensation.

Elizabeth Moss is brilliant with this long, slow disintegration. I could compare her performance to Elizabeth Taylor in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' or Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf.

Katherine Waterston, daughter of the beloved Law and Order actor San Waterston, plays a hard edged, unkind, and self centered rich girl. She is unable to help her friend with debilitating depression. In fact she worsens the situation with her criticism, and harsh comments. She is a slender brunette with Ali McGraw looks. Look for more good work from this actress.

The movie moves slow as a glacier. The visual elements are very simple. The lovely house, the lake, and the faces of the two actresses are the main elements. Extremely important is the music.

The musical score establishes the mood, the dread, the tension, the intense unease which characterizes this film. A woman walking down a flight of steps turns into a tense and anxious scene because of the musical score. Another writer/director would have used a voice over to communicate with the audience. Director Alex Ross Perry uses music.

I believe this is only the 4th film by Alex Perry. I think it is a very ambitious undertaking. It is similar in pace and mood to the Lars von Trier film Melancholia. I look forward to more films from Alex Ross Perry.

This is not for every one. It is a very slow and unhappy movie. The characters are not likable. The men are horrid. It is a study of two women and a friendship which is no longer viable. It is a study of a woman who loses her grip on reality and has no one to help her. It is an excellent film with a brilliant performance worthy of an Oscar by Elizabeth Moss.

I went into Queen of the Earth with so much good will. The premise sounds like it has a great deal of potential - a woman's (Elizabeth Moss) father dies and she goes to try and get away from everything in the wake of this and breaking up with her boyfriend to a cabin by a lake that her best friend (Katharine Waterston) has, and from there she starts to lose her mind. I hadn't seen The Color Wheel or Listen up Phillip, the previous Alex Ross Perry films, but I am an admirer of Elizabeth Moss (just last year she was in a little seen but awesome indie movie, The One I Love), and I thought she could pull off a deep and interesting character. The trouble is, the resulting film Queen of the Earth isn't deep or interesting, though it would very much like to be and pretends to be.

It paigns me to rag on a film that is trying to be ambitious in the psychological/interior sense. It's not that the world lacks independent film dramas dealing with loss and mental instability, but it's always good to have well made ones that let the audience in to the character's pain and, perhaps, see that person grow. But the core problem with the movie is that it doesn't give enough context for the main character's misery. In a sense the format reminded me of Lars von Trier's Antichrist, only without the hilarious fox or over-the-top antics involving castration: someone loses a loved one, they go off to the middle of the woods with a close friend, and then the bile spews out. And Queen of the Earth is nothing but an experience where characters are loaded with bile to one another scene after scene.

Of course a story dealing with grief and loss and mental fractions should be taking itself seriously, of course... but maybe it should also allow a tone that doesn't hit the same ugly sensations. Even in the flashbacks Moss and Waterston's characters are sniping at one another in passive-aggressive or just aggressive ways, and even the (very) few semi-happy moments are tinged with the flavor of dread. After an opening shot where we see Moss crying and in hysterics - and to be fair, it's an amazingly acted and shot scene - it never really loses that tone, and yet we also never get a sense of WHERE and WHO this character was at before all of this; it's all told to us (that she had a father who was reviled, that she is reviled as a "spoiled brat", that she should get over herself, her art, etc).

Part of the approach may be due to the low-budget - Perry didn't quite get started with the 'mumblecore' filmmakers, but he's in the same ballpark - and yet there's little actual creativity, or any sense of empathy that the audience can have in the writing, at least from my perspective. Part of the problem too is due to the style, where Perry gets composer Keegan DeWitt to hit the same ominous, horror-movie notes, and it's draining. In scene after scene it's as though we are locked in with one woman, Catherine, who is a head-case and is becoming undone further and further along (the same tone is basically, 'why can't they leave me alone') and she is not that interesting as a miserable character, and Virginia is even worse. There's no arc with either of these people, no sense of growth whether it's up or down (well, I guess Catherine DOES get worse, but you know what I mean, the trajectory is muddled and shallow); that may be part of the point, but it doesn't work in this case.

I can see why the film was made, to bring a full atmospheric experience through eerie-grainy 16mm cinematography, and to highlight how, well I guess, society people are people too. But aside from Moss's performance, as she really is trying and going for this full- throttle (she produced too), Queen of the Earth comes off as a miserable, empty time.

Alex Ross Perry's "Queen of Earth" is a very demanding psychological drama. It has indie feature written all over it, and looking at the reviews and ratings, it comes as no surprise to see that so many people were turned off by its slow-moving nature and the almost tedious length of its dialogues. On the surface, it could easily look like "Queen of Earth" consists of talking, long gazing and nothing else. But underneath its exterior, the film offers a thoughtful and deep exploration of the motivations and thoughts behind its main character, played superbly and memorably by Elisabeth Moss, and utilizes its obvious Bergman-esque influences to create a unique, mystifying and entrancing atmosphere. By the half point, I was entranced, at the end, I was almost sad to leave these characters behind. "Queen of Earth" is a highly unusual film in that there isn't much of a plot, but it still has a lot to say. It's definitely worth watching, but only for those who enter the experience with an open mind and are not easily turned off by the arguments I described above. Also, if you're a fan of Elisabeth Moss's work, then just watch it for her incredible performance which I personally cannot believe got completely left out of any awards conversations whatsoever.

To me, this was one of those supposed deep dramas that produced only unlikable characters, espousing psychological drivel throughout, and thus in the end just became ponderous and irritating to watch. Often told through flashbacks, it held my interest for a while, wondering where it was all going. I should have known better because it ended up going nowhere, all the way to its highly ambiguous finale.

Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston star as Catherine and Virginia respectively. Catherine has come up to her best friend Virginia's family vacation home to get some rest and relaxation. Her emotional state is quite unstable, after her father, a renowned artist committed suicide, and her partner has told her he's having an affair with another woman.

If these two women are best friends, I wouldn't like to meet their enemies, because Catherine and Virginia are constantly bickering at their best moments and being cruel and hostile to each other at their worst. They're joined from time to time by Virginia's neighbor Rich (Patrick Fugit), who's in a relationship of some sorts with Virginia, and who seems to delight in "adding fuel to the fire" whenever he can to provoke the unstable Catherine.

All in all, I imagine the writer and director here Alex Ross Perry, was aiming for a deep meaningful film, but all I found it to be was a tedious and irritating waste of time.

'QUEEN OF EARTH': Three and a Half Stars (Out of Five)

A psychological thriller flick written and directed by indie filmmaker, and actor, Alex Ross Perry. It tells the story of two childhood friends, that reunite at a lake house, as adult women, and find out they no longer feel close. The movie stars Elisabeth Moss, Katherine Waterston and Patrick Fugit. Perry and Moss were also producers on the film, along with Adam Piotrowicz and the very prolific Joe Swanberg. The movie is very impressive, stylistically speaking, but it's also a little bit of a mess, from a dramatic storytelling point of view.

Catherine (Moss) and Virginia (Waterston) are two women, who were very close while growing up. They've continued to reunite, every summer, at a vacation lake house; owned by Virginia's family. Over the past few years, they've started to grow apart; and became very bitter towards each other. Their recent relations with men, have really driven the two to a breaking point; as Catherine also starts to lose her sanity.

The movie is very beautifully shot, and the music is haunting and very memorable; with a classic (and very campy) B movie feel to it. The film is played out like a thriller, but it's actually more of a dramatic character study; and it's an excellent examination of female relationships (and mental illness) as well. Moss and Waterston are both really good in the film, and Perry's direction is excellent. It's not a perfect film, but it is a memorable one.

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