Kritiken

You could imagine it being turned into a quirky-cute odd-couple indie comedy with a superficial take on neurodivergence. Instead, McKenzie pulls us into Star’s reality, how she experiences the world. It’s a disorientating, unrelaxing two-hour experience, but rewarding.

Past the opening 30 minutes or so, it becomes a disappointingly passive movie with few fresh ideas and oddly little to comment upon. It opens with promise but closes without having delivered on much of that promise, in the end a distinctly ordinary portrait of two decidedly unordinary people.

With her second feature, Queens of the Qing Dynasty, McKenzie has both developed and totally altered her aesthetic to form something considerably more focused and transfixing [than her debut, Werewolf].

McKenzie doesn’t rely on the usual uplifting messaging and strained empowerment arc to humanize An and Star... Their friendship remains mysterious, yet the film, as if by witchcraft, makes their connection feel palpable and true.

Hopeful and deeply emotional, McKenzie has crafted a film that feels like a fairytale for these isolating times. It reminds us how much we need each other in order to flourish and fully know ourselves.

“Queens” is a much more deliberate work than “Werewolf,” and at two hours it’s able to sink deeper into its characterizations and ideas... [The film] pays its twin heroes compliment after compliment, praising their resilience, their compassion, their honesty, all without losing sight of just how hard it is for them to live.

[Queens of the Qing Dynasty] is at once rigorously intimate and richly symbolic. Though it can feel long at two hours and forced in its metaphors, it’s a successfully upscaled project showing McKenzie as an artist sketching expansive scenes on the canvas of her native Cape Breton.

Queens of the Qing Dynasty may posit a world where harsh government protocols foster default modes of segregation and fractured communication, but it also realizes the thrilling potential for others to psychically seep into our orbits to help navigate the arduous path ahead.

One of the many pleasures of Queens of the Qing Dynasty is the emotional intimacy generated by a character who lives in a perpetual state of radical, reckless honesty... the film actively situates [one] in a diegetic space untainted by ego.

McKenzie embraces authenticity above all else... She knows that pain is a huge part of life and refuses to sanitize her characters’ journey to save them from that struggle.