Sadly Over-hyped

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

Grief, loss, mental trauma and co-dependency are explored in writer and director Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth. A raw psychological drama with a keynote performance from Elisabeth Moss who at times unleashes bile at those around her.Moss plays Catherine who grew up together with Ginny (Katherine Waterston) her best friend, they are spending a week at a remote lake house which they also did the previous year. At that time it was Ginny whose life was in turmoil with Catherine helping her to pull through.Now Catherine is in a dark place with mental instability due to the death of her father and the ending of a relationship with her boyfriend.Over the following days both women realise that they have been drifting apart for some time with Ginny unable to help Catherine through her mental trauma. Catherine seems even more bitter that this year Gina has brought along a new boyfriend with her.The film has a lot of moody shots, Moss looks great with her make up running down looking that she is on the edge of a breakdown but this film is a slog to watch and is just too ponderous.

"Queen of Earth" is a difficult, disturbing movie. It reminds me of Altman's "3 Women", with the use of unbearable silence, dissonant soundtracks, and characters whose motivations are hard to understand, in situations hard for us to contextualise. It is not as haunting as that movie, though, and therefore not as good. I don't think this is one I'm going to be thinking about much after having seen it.The plot concerns two "best friends" who go away for a week together despite the fact that they don't seem to like each other much. One, the main character, has just been dumped by her boyfriend who was with her when she went away with the same best friend last year. There is also a guy, kind of like an antagonist, who was with the friend last year and has shown up this year again, much to the protagonist's discomfort.There are some very intense scenes, such as the main character breaking down at a party, and the movie seems to be becoming an enthralling descent into madness, but then it abruptly changes gear, and not for the first time. It's not going to give you any easy answers like that, but in this case, I also came up short on questions.

"Queen of Earth" follows a week's vacation at a summer house between two friends, Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) and Virginia (Katherine Waterston). Catherine, who has recently lost her artist father to suicide, is emotionally numb and fragile, and a rift begins to form when a male neighbor (Patrick Fugit) joins the friends, which propels Catherine into psychological breakdown."Queen of Earth" is a referential throwback to a myriad of feminine psychothrillers of the sixties and seventies, painted in broad streaks of Bergman and Altman, as well as making nods to obscure horror films of that era, including "Carnival of Souls" and "Let's Scare Jessica to Death." Writer/director Alex Ross Perry is clearly a student of these films, and in many ways, "Queen of Earth" seems to be a love letter to those films.The film has a stark visual flair to it, with heavy use of closeups, continuous takes, and photography of the rural woodsy landscape, all of which accentuate atmosphere and tension. The script is thin yet rich in subtext, which provides the actors ample material to really sink their teeth into. Elisabeth Moss's performance is eerie and dynamic, while Waterston's is sincere and understated. As a meditation on the ennui and turmoil of privileged New England Generation Y-ers, the film offers little that's compelling; however, the darker visual elements and nods to the horror genre lend an absorbing and subtly creepy element that throws what could have been a tired retread of "poor little rich girl" into something far darker and nuanced. The conclusion is ambiguous and the lack of "resolution" will no doubt frustrate some, but the film prevails as a portrait of a psychological meltdown in the tradition of the best of them. 8/10.

A fascinating film, perhaps, for the uber elite who live in the rarefied world of privileged exceptionalism, where the life of the common person is a vague, if non-existent reality, and are instead obsessively immersed in a self absorbed universe of which they are perpetually at the center of.As for the portrayal of such, Elisabeth Moss does convincingly deliver her character with a unique sense of familiarity.The problem I had with this film is not the story itself, which probes into the frailties of the human condition within this rarefied social ecology, but rather with the pathetic nature of all of these nauseatingly self absorbed characters, none of whom I would ever have anything in common with, even under the most demanding of required social circumstances.Call me a "salt of the earth" servile dolt if so inclined, if such makes you feel more self important, but what this film did do is remind me why I have specifically avoided spending any amount of time or effort becoming enmeshed in the dramatic pathologies of the supposedly social elite, which this film does deliver a compelling depiction of.This general environment I'm quite familiar with, having had my more than my share of exposure into this sort of universe . . . and opting out of it completely.As for the film itself as an art piece, it is an interesting voyage into the disintegrating psyche of fragile, needy people.Deciphering exactly where the boundaries were between the actual realities of the moment, and the collage of flashbacks and self induced fantasies which would jaggedly pop in and out of the story thread was a bit exhausting at times, but overall this was a brave attempt to deliver a multi-threaded tapestry of intersecting plots which clearly would have been easily rendered in written form, but compressing such into a film would be much more demanding.