Queen of Earth

2015
6.2| 1h30m| NR| en| More Info
Released: 26 August 2015 Released
Producted By: Washington Square Films
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Info

Two women retreat to a lake house to get a break from the pressures of the outside world, only to realize how disconnected from each other they have become, allowing their suspicions to bleed into reality.

Genre

Drama, Thriller

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Queen of Earth (2015) is now streaming with subscription on AMC+

Director

Alex Ross Perry

Production Companies

Washington Square Films

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Queen of Earth Audience Reviews

Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever
Micitype Pretty Good
Megamind To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.
Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
omarelshiekh I Don't understand why you do the effort as a filmmaker to look deep and important,when you actually have nothing to talk about,the movie is full of very long empty boring dialogues and that's it,acting is poor,directing is poorer.Personally I get offended when a movie pretends to look deep when actually it is so shallow and empty.
Jake Peters =====THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS=====I went to watch this film with an open mind, knowing a relatively small amount about its storyline other than a brief synopsis. This is supposed to be a thriller. I cannot say I felt any tension, any fear, any anticipation. All I ended up doing was become increasingly annoyed at the 1st AC who kept missing his focus marks.The film is essentially Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" crossed with Wiseau's "The Room". Mulholland Drive made no sense and you were constantly introduced to new ideas which led nowhere - this film is the same. Like The Room, it features a dull and clichéed screenplay (though at least in The Room it was delivered in such an entertaining way that one could still watch it with enjoyment) which doesn't hold any sort of story together. You spend most of the film expecting it to lead somewhere, and it never does. Perhaps the director wanted to give a nod to The Room when he introduced the completely pointless character sleeping outside.Cinematically, the film's editor uses tacky fonts to establish settings and continuously cuts to shots of rippling water for no apparent reason. As each day progresses in the story, the same thing just happens over and over again. Sometimes there will be some horrific colour temperature changes from one cut to the next that instantly jump out. Other times you're left watching a generally out-of-focus Katherine Waterston running for a good 20 seconds for no apparent reason.One long scene in the middle of the film could have been left out and would have made no difference. The performance is only impressive if it adds to the story, and with such a linear and mundane storyline, it is lost on the audience, particularly on the strange ECUs which linger far too long and go in and out of focus too many times to keep count.Most unforgivable is the easily avoidable breaking of the fourth wall during a scene where Katherine Waterston is wearing sunglasses and we are treated to a very clear reflection of the boom operator THREE TIMES! I am amazed nobody noticed during filming.Elsewhere on the sound front, there are several scenes which feature horrible audio bytes of character interaction with loud objects, which should be avoided where possible as it's just difficult to concentrate with rustling packets taking prominence over a character's dialogue.Unfortunately, I think any quality in acting which exists in the film is let down by the cinematography and the screenplay. And most other things. And if the director wanted to make it a cult classic like The Room, I'm afraid he hasn't made it.
lasttimeisaw Double bill time! US indie filmmaker Alex Ross Perry's two latest offerings, vary in their own strains, LISTEN UP PHILIP is a Woody Allen-esque drama-comedy and QUEEN OF EARTH probes into a more psycho-horror genre without resorting to cheap scare.The former, stars Schwartzman as the titular Philip Lewis Friedman, an up-and-coming novelist is on the cusp of publishing his second novel, but finds himself in contradictions with everything in his life. Wearing a seasonally-inappropriate jacket, a metaphor of his failure of accustoming his ever-distending ego to the reality, Philip waywardly puts a damper on the relationship with his live- in girlfriend of two years, Ashley (Moss), an aspiring photographer, after he accepts an open-end invitation from a venerable writer Ike Zimmerman (Pryce), whom he vastly admires, to stay with him in the latter's country house under the pretext of rendering a finishing touch to his upcoming novel.Cynical as me, an instantaneous question emerges, why Zimmerman wants to help Philip at the first place? Since what we have been imbued as far is that Philip is an objectionable egomaniac who may or may not have the potential to be a sterling writer, betrays his sexist stance and well- conceived jealousy as soon as he has the possibility to achieve something (Ashley has always been the breadwinner in their relationship). Cunningly the downside of Ike's seemingly comfy life bares itself, he needs Philip - not just as an impressionable young man to whom he can impart his wisdom, as much as Philip needs him, the tension between him and his daughter Melanie (Ritter), the writer's blocks and shrouding loneliness consume his strength, more pragmatically and pathetically he needs Philip to be his wingman if he want to get laid with younger chicks. So, to answer my question, Ike sees himself in Philip, and Philip takes him as a role model, they share the same rotten DNAs. Great writers can inspire epiphany and confer wisdom to readers through their erudite thoughts and conception, one might think they (or at least the really estimable ones) would lead a sensible and judicious life, obviously Perry cannot second that.Introduced by an obtrusively wordy voice-over (Bogosian), continues like a running commentary rambling on the characters' pickles with unapologetically pseudo-intellectual eloquence; shot with hand-held immediacy and close-ups a gogo, LISTEN UP PHILIP is at its worst being too quirky and conceited in its high-brow affectations, while at its best retaining an honest take on a real-life jerk's ups-and-downs, significantly owing to a well-chosen cast, Schwartzman is in his wheelhouse to be mercilessly arrogant and self-centred, which otherwise, accentuates Moss' visceral and layered performance which gratifyingly holds the ground in the finale, and Pryce has been allotted with munificent screen-time to establish Ike as someone whose remorse is as vague as his smugness.In QUEEN OF EARTH, Alex Ross Perry ventures into a more daring and unsettling territory, pairs Moss and Waterston as two life-long friends Catherine and Virginia, but intriguingly pivots around the mental deterioration of Catherine, who has not only recently loses her artist father (in suicide), not also in the opening sequences, breaks up with her longtime boyfriend James (Audley).Immediately the camera takes us to a lake house retreat, which is owned by Virginia's uncle. Catherine is invited by Virginia to stay with her there, to recuperate from the nadir. Then flashbacks and cutaways shows that one year earlier, before Catherine losing those two important men in her life, she and James had also spent their vacation with Virginia in the same place, and the atmosphere was not all that pleasant, the two girls were bickering all the time, throwing snide at each other, do they suppose to be besties?The tranquility doesn't quite work in favour of Catherine, who has no interest in swimming in the lake or jogging in the morning, as if she is struck by some strange lethargy, and the interaction between them is also not wholesome, constantly felt being watched by Virginia, Catherine tip-toes around when she is making phone-calls, their intimate conversations loses its momentum pretty quickly, although, nothing really happens, Catherine becomes increasingly watchful and retreats to herself, especially after the advent of Rich (Fugit), Virginia's man friend lives nearby, whom Catherine and James met also one years before.Imposing a more static strategy of framing, this time, Perry collectedly deploys natural sound (humming, droning, whirring, rustling) and an unsettlingly ambient score from DeWitt as major players in the game, together they suffuse the narrative as a haunting and mythifying undertone, fittingly trace out Catherine's paranoia and slide. After the sly (if not entirely unnecessary) implications of a murder (with a discombobulating cameo from Keith Poulson) and body horror (the pain in the face could lead to an apposite nightmarish scenario when the bones beneath are struggling for emergence), Catherine consummates her meltdown by giving Rich a mind-blowing dressing-down and later a creepy surrender-pleading-seduction combo to further throw herself down to the mental dysfunctional abyss. Moss is unbelievably versatile and emotive here, chilling, disquieting and unforgiving and Waterston proves herself a dab hand of deception and subtlety in her passive-aggressive retribution.That's when Perry cagily divulges the reason behind in the last snippet of flashback, if everything turns out to be a carefully planned revenge, could it justify the entire story? It's a tricky question, but one thing is for sure, QUEEN OF EARTH is a surprising oddity endeavours to fearlessly tap into the boundary and essential compositions of friendship between two (female) friends, and artfully construes its aftermath with a firm sleight-of-hand.
MisterWhiplash 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.