Queen of Earth
Director: Alex Ross Perry
Talent: Elisabeth Moss, Katherine Waterston, Patrick Fugit, Kentucker Audley
Release Date: 1st July
A common trope of conventional self-help wisdom is that of cutting negative people out of your life. The idea being that, by isolating yourself from certain bad relationships, be they with friends, colleagues or family members, you give yourself the ability to be happy on your own terms. The language of this ruthless sort of social psychology — negative influencers, cutting people out, codependency, bad energy — has become a ubiquitous part of Western popular culture, in much the same way that the ideas of psychoanalysis — the unconscious, slips of the tongue, the ego, superego and id — gained mass traction in the early to mid-20th century, and remain to a greater or lesser degree present in the popular vocabulary of today. It is with both schools of thought apparently at the forefront of his mind that writer-director Alex Ross Perry has conceived of Queen of Earth, an unsettling, low-key depiction of a failing friendship between two young women that feels eerily like a low-budget ’70s horror film.
This is primarily a tragedy about psychic and emotional underdevelopment, what Melanie Klein called the “paranoid-schizoid position”, and the struggle of two women, Catherine (Moss) and Virginia (Waterston), to break out of it. Both are engaged in an essentially narcissistic relation to the other; one which reaches fever pitch when, Persona-like, they retreat to Virginia’s family lake house following an ignominious break-up of Catherine’s. As their inability or unwillingness to connect to one another and, perhaps, to anyone else become more and more pronounced, the situation becomes almost excruciatingly ominous, not helped by the arrival of neighbour Rich (Fugit), of ambiguous relationship to Virginia and no fan of Catherine’s. What might appear on one level as a drama about the cruelty that can exist between friends seems increasingly to be a minor horror about sadness, paranoia, psychic retreat, and the awful realisation that what is held up as panacea for these tends merely to be a therapeutic expression of their self-same logic.
Words: Oisín Murphy-Hall
