Queen of Earth
classified 15Please note: This was screened in July 2016
Following on from Listen Up Philip, Alex Ross Perry further mines the dark side of the psyche with this stunning drama about the reunion of two, it turns out, not-so-close school friends.
Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) has entered a particularly dark phrase in her life: her father, a pampered famous artist whose affairs she managed, has recently died, and on the heels of his death she's dumped by her boyfriend James. With relaxation and the idea of gathering her thoughts on her mind, Catherine heads to her friend Virginia's (Katherine Waterston) lake house for some much needed rest. However, once she arrives relaxation proves difficult to find, as she is overcome with memories of James at the house the year before, cracks in the relationship between the two women begin to appear, and Catherine starts descending into a downward spiral of delusion and madness.
An open wound, Moss is terrific in this devilish study of mental breakdown and dysfunctional female power dynamics - Queen of Earth is a film about not getting over it, and the complex effects of misery.