Queen of Earth“It’s one of the worst tendencies of human nature to assume the best of people.”

If ever a writer/director put the philosophy driving his movies into dialogue, this quote, coming midway through Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth, is among the most accurate. Alex Ross Perry makes films about ugly people. There’s no getting around that. Perhaps we could say he makes films about the ugliness in all of us, but that ugliness is so amplified, identification with his characters is difficult. I say this because it needs to be understood heading into his work if your’e going to take anything away from it, and given the richness and depth therein, to write him off because you don’t like his characters would be a mistake. I felt this way the first time I tried to watch his 2014 effort Listen Up Philip. I hadn’t heard anything about it before sitting down to watch, but even as a longtime fan of Jason Schwartzman, I turned it off after ten minutes. The intensity of his character’s narcissism was difficult to take. I understand we are all to varying degrees guilty of narcissism, but the scenes in which he tells off his ex-girlfriend for being twenty minutes late and his college friend for not being as successful a writer as he is are difficult to endure. True, there’s a comedic edge to it. The fact that after telling off his college friend, the college friend proceeds to wheel himself out in a wheelchair gave me a good laugh. But there was something deeper at play that I missed the first time around, even after I forced myself to watch the whole film. In these two pieces of cinema, Alex Ross Perry is interested in the ways we create a subjective world around us, the ways we maintain self-delusions, and what happens when these delusions break down.

This is the subject of Queen of Earth, Perry’s latest film. The film stars Elizabeth Moss as Catherine, a young woman who, after her prominent New York “artiste” father dies and her boyfriend leaves, retreats to her friend Ginny’s parent’s cabin in the woods and proceeds to fall to pieces. Perry is, of course, treading a well-traveled subgenre of damaged psychological portraits from Bergman’s Persona to Polanski’s Repulsion, and the film bears hallmarks these other films, from the late-night confessions Bergman employed to get at (and ultimately fail to remedy) what ails his characters to the presentation of delusional states as reality in Repulsion. The film cuts back and forth between the present day interactions of Ginny and Catherine and a trip they took the year before during which a great deal of tension was created by Catherine bringing her boyfriend James. During both trips, relations between the friends are strained to say the least. Both Ginny and Catherine aim snide barbs at one another that leave boyfriend James and Ginny’s love interest Rich on the periphery feeling deeply uncomfortable. Ginny implies that Catherine works as her father’s assistant only through nepotism to which Catherine responds that Ginny hasn’t had to work a day in her life, and this opens a theme of entitlement and privilege that runs throughout the course of the picture. “I used to think you were so perfect,” Ginny confesses late in the film. “I used to think you had it all figured out, but you were just surrounding yourself with men. They took care of you.”

Whether this is true or not is open for debate, since the only time we see the men Catherine surrounds herself with they’re making small insignificant gestures toward her like brewing her a cup of coffee or leaving her for another woman. What is true, however, is that these women, despite the bonds of friendship they profess to share, don’t take very good care of each other. In the face of Catherine’s deteriorating mental state, Ginny proceeds to invite Rich over, a move which is later revealed to be a payback for Catherine’s bringing James the year before. Catherine is obviously on shaky ground. She complains that the bones beneath her face are grinding. She conducts long phone conversations on a cordless phone, and when Ginny picks up the other end, she discovers that Catherine is talking to dial tone. One night Catherine goes outside and discovers a man who has fallen unconscious on the property. She invites him in, and during their conversation, casually drops, “I could murder you right now, and no one would ever know.” The camera cuts outside to night, and we’re left to wonder, did she? Was there ever a man at all? Was it simply delusion?

Amidst all this, Ginny continues to bring Rich around, and Rich antagonizes Catherine. He pokes at the wound of her father’s death, accuses her of self-importance. This culminates in a speech Catherine gives over dinner blaming Rich for her mental state and her father’s demise. He couldn’t live in a world with people like you, she accuses. Is she dodging responsibility? Shifting blame? Is she partially right? Her father was wealthy, and Rich seems to take delight in the fact the mighty have fallen. During a party scene it’s alluded to that one of the guests has seen Catherine on TV and her father’s demise was linked to a Madoff-like financial con, though its never clear where her father stood in this.

Throughout Queen of the Night, I couldn’t help wondering: if we don’t like Catherine, is watching her breakdown voyeuristic? Is it any less voyeuristic if we do like her? Are we, as the audience, similar to Rich? Do we take delight in the spectacle of her deterioration? It has been said that a person can put up with almost anything but an assault on their self-image. Assail the way someone wants to see themselves, force them to confront a different reality, and they’ll never forgive you. This also came to mind at the climax of Queen. Rich shows up in her room to give as good a lashing down as he got, Catherine descends and disappears, and the film leaves us to question, what happened to her?

The ugliness in Perry’s film, as difficult as it can be, is refreshing. There aren’t many American movies being made right now this challenging. Although there are cinematic touchstones for his work, it’s original, engaging. If you’re willing to endure his characters, you’ll come away rewarded. He’s not portraying real life so much as amplifying the negative aspects within us, our selfishness and narcissism, the ways we work to destroy one another. He refuses to soften the edges on his characters, and this isn’t going to win him a wide audience, but he’s making good work. On reflection, I might even say great. But we have to see how it stands the test of time. Given that, having finished Queen of Earth, I was moved to revisit Listen Up Philip and look for similar themes, themes a viewing of Earth might bring to the surface in his previous film, I’d say Perry stands as a director we can expect exciting things from in years to come.