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Critics reviews

QUEEN OF EARTH

Alex Ross Perry United States, 2015
Perry is a master of the combative turns of phrase and he's someone who would never need his characters to use physical weapons to cause harm. He murders with monologues. A superlative script is one thing, but Queen of Earth soars on the back of two scintillating central performances from Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston.
June 30, 2016
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This tightly-focused exercise in Finding The Bad In People is even more assured and discomfiting that Perry's Listen Up Philip.
December 18, 2015
While Perry freely assimilates influences from both the "high" (e.g., PERSONA, REPULSION, etc.) and "low" (e.g., CARNIVAL OF SOULS, LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH, etc.) ends of the cinematic spectrum, QUEEN OF EARTH resonates not because it's any kind of post-modern pastiche but because of what it has to say about real-world human psychology. In particular, Perry taps into universal fears and anxieties about class privilege and nepotism.
September 4, 2015
For a viewer looking back decades from now at the movies of this time, Alex Ross Perry's new film "Queen of Earth," which opened last week and is expanding to theatres nationwide today, will serve as an example of the sort of complex modernism that has become both common coin and rare treasure among the best filmmakers.
September 4, 2015
[Catherine's] self-conscious machinations don't exactly endear us to the character, but Moss animates her so fully and fearsomely that it hardly matters. The same could be said for Perry's filmmaking, which seems content to pull strings from afar before yanking you in close through the conviction of its craft. The film would be nothing but a hollow exercise if its hollowness weren't so hauntingly precise.
September 3, 2015
Writer-director Alex Ross Perry (The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip) conjures such a strong atmosphere around his characters—and Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston are so powerful in the leads—that one gets sucked into their emotional conflict. Perry has cited Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water as an influence, and like Polanski he excels at creating a sense of claustrophobia; Queen of Earth is about the terror of feeling trapped in one's own head.
September 3, 2015
The opening sets the tone well for the remainder of Perry's film. We don't ever see Catherine at such heightened levels of obvious despair again. But the agony, the paranoia, the sheer existential terror of grief becomes sublimated into the very style of the film. Queen of Earth is a psychodrama shot like a horror movie – Persona meets The Shining. Right down to the haunting, minimalist score (by Keegan DeWitt) that's perched dangerously, wonderfully between spooky and lyrical.
August 30, 2015
You want to become absorbed in its drama, but you can't help feeling distanced by the suspicion that perhaps Perry has simply boosted the potential of slender material by applying an elegant, allusive, knowingly retro style... I'm inclined to give Perry the benefit of the doubt, at the very least; his gracefully disturbing execution conveys a tangible sense of the emotional violence and attrition that can underlie seemingly placid social surfaces, can even underlie the closest friendship.
August 28, 2015
As Moss and Waterston access the full spectrum of their actorly registers, psychic trauma surfaces, dramatic tension rises, and covert and overt emotional warfare ensues, punctuated by jarring transitions and flashbacks, signs and portents, hallucinations and transference. Queen of Earth rings changes on the grand tradition of single-set female-centric psycho-thriller two-handers like Altman's Images or Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
August 27, 2015
In some ways, Queen of Earth is a step back for the director... Yet it is often the case that a minor effort from a true talent can be as revealing as a major one. If Perry made the film to test himself, he ends up with his most impressive technical experiment to date, pushing his partnership with Williams to new heights and gradually replacing a film made of subtle quotations and vague approximations with something wholly Perry's.
August 27, 2015
Catherine's deterioration feels dread-soaked and dangerous, and it happens with the agonizing deliberateness of a suspense director pulling the strings. Following up a smaller but no less powerful role in Listen Up Philip, Moss plays Catherine not as a woman weakened by circumstance, but as someone who lashes out as a desperate form of self-defense.
August 27, 2015
Perry and his recurring collaborator, cinematographer Sean Price Williams, shoot them from spitting distance, letting no scowl, grimace, simper, or leer go unnoticed. In contrast to the freewheeling comic energy of Philip, Queen of Earth has a chilly observational patience, fixating on its dueling subjects as their environment is subsumed into swatches of brown, green, and mauve.
August 26, 2015