Is Alex Ross Perry America’s best contemporary filmmaker? If your voice is counted among the uproar raised over Perry’s 2014 film, Listen Up Philip, that shouldn’t even be a question, but that film plays only to palates honed to withstand the acrid taste of wanton awfulness. Perry makes lovely, fractured movies about hideous people. Watching his work delights the mind while corroding the soul. Sharp staccato dialogue and humor as black as pitch don’t ameliorate the bothersome notion that we’re enabling his parades of misery. Taken from that angle, Perry’s latest, Queen of Earth, feels like more of the same, except that it overflows with an urgent sense of humanity that his past efforts willfully elide.
The movie is no less disquieting for Perry’s newfound compassion, of course. Why wouldn’t it be? Perry doesn’t go easy on his viewers, which in part is why he’s earned such cachet among cinephiles with such a slim feature filmography. The Perry experience is a sprint. You have to be quick on your feet if you expect to keep up with him. He crams so much writing and tension into each scene that Queen of Earth feels longer than it actually is, which is more of a compliment than it sounds. Faint-hearted types might want to give the film a pass, then, if not for its density then for its disposition. It’s a kinder picture than Listen Up Philip that amazingly manages to be twice as merciless. We have no reason to give a damn about Philip. Here, we can’t help but feel for Catherine (Elisabeth Moss). She’s a woman smack-dab in the middle of a nervous breakdown.
We’re introduced to Catherine in the most unflattering of ways as Queen of Earth opens. Perry’s lens presses relentlessly toward her face while she stares off-frame, wild-eyed and tear-streaked as her boyfriend James (Kentucker Audley, the absolute worst movie boyfriend in 2015) breaks up with her. Their disunion isn’t the worst thing to happen to Catherine: Her dad, a preeminent New York artist, is recently deceased, too, and the sudden split with James leaves her in a precarious mental state and with almost no one left to love her. The only caring soul Catherine can reliably call on is her bestie, Virginia (Katherine Waterston), and so Catherine makes for Virginia’s parents’ lake house to patch herself up and move on with her life.
Moving on swiftly becomes a bleak, agonizing farce. If you haven’t seen any of Perry’s movies, you can’t begin to imagine how poorly that goes, and even if you have, Queen of Earth still may knock you off your guard. The film is about women trapped in cycles of dissatisfaction and disappointment, and how their personal cycles merge into a larger, more insidious cycle. Decorum dissolves with breathtaking alacrity once Catherine and Virginia settle in: The seams of their relationship start splitting several stitches at a time. Men—not just James, but Virginia’s neighbor, Rich (Patrick Fugit)—are only a partial factor in the sundering of this friendship. The rest is all passive-aggression, aggressive-aggression, and resentments both spoken and unspoken.