Alex Ross Perry loves faces. His latest, Queen of Earth, is a story composed of close-ups. In the age of spectacle and CGI (which I’m not bemoaning), it’s unsettling and slightly horrific to sit in a theater for 90 minutes with such big faces, especially those like the viscerally distressed ones featured in this film.
Rarely are we allowed to gaze for long, unbroken periods of time at another person’s face. It requires a level of intimacy with which most are not comfortable. That’s why the cinematic close-up (emphasis on cinematic) is a uniquely compelling composition. In a theater, faces can be projected on a massive scale, making that shot, if employed effectively, an act of unparalleled communal intimacy. The face’s lines, bumps, and scars reveal a past, while its twitches, expressions, and movements communicate present, subjective experience better than the spoken word.
Evident from the film’s establishing shot, Queen of Earth is a tale of dissolution. Elizabeth Moss’ Catherine is melting. Her mascara is smeared, blacking out her eyes. Her hair is a medusa-like tangle. Tears canvas her cheeks. The tip of her nose is red, bitten by sadness. If madness had a mask, Moss’ face would serve a worthy cast. This entire first scene, which documents Catherine and her boyfriend James breaking up, plays out almost entirely in this single close-up. And as the breakdown following the breakup begins, Perry’s camera remains shoved into the emotional and psychic crevasses of the cast’s faces.
This film is a tale of two faces – “Catherine’s and her “best friend” Virginia’s (Katherine Waterston), who provides a summer refuge for her broken-hearted friend. In the hard year since they’ve last seen each other, Catherine has lost not only her boyfriend, but her father as well. The boyfriend fell to infidelity; and her father to suicide. She is in need of a shelter, and Virginia provides the perfect haven: a secluded, woodland vacation home.
Mostly, Virginia watches Catherine’s strange behavior: Catherine hides in her room, complains that her face hurts as if her skull is shifting, and lashes out at her friends. It’s all very woman-on-the-verge until Perry slowly shifts perspective and allows for a more balanced lens. Watching Virginia observe Catherine reveals a mental state as distressed though not as crazed. Perry’s intent to scrutinize the friendship becomes clear as scenes fade from the present to the summer before when Catherine and Virginia’s roles were reversed. Then, Virginia, seeking solace after a breakup, wound up stuck with Catherine and her then-boyfriend James. In lieu of refuge, she found repulsive cutesiness and unwarranted indifference.
What’s most interesting—and honest—about Perry’s script is that he never devotes attention to a time when the two actually seem like good friends. Each proves an idle and indifferent friend when the other needs a shoulder. Perry pulls no punches. Each conversation is tense and truth-y in that “I’m shielding my hateful, unfiltered opinion of you by calling it the ‘truth’” kind of way. Yet Perry has enough grace to show these two women as something other than wholly careless and mean – even if they are rich, privileged white girls living in the city off daddy’s money, a point which Perry is equally adamant about making. Even still, everything in Queen of Earth is on it’s way down, and its path is especially harrowing given the perspective Perry chooses to traverse the descent.
Catherine’s affliction is depression. It haunts her. She insists on being alone but continually, if not reluctantly, finds herself around people. She becomes hysterical when asked about her life yet isn’t capable of shifting her perspective or setting. Some of the film’s most buoyant yet poignant scenes are of Catherine soaking in the sun, donning the truest, most heartbreaking smiles of the film.
Moss’ performance here is a stand-out. Her stiff, ethereal unhinging is as calculated and emotive as a ballerina is fluid and nimble. If a ruptured friendship composes Queen of Earth’s heart, Moss is its shattered psyche. Yet the embodiment of this affliction would be bloodless without the film’s absolute precision of its craftsmen.
Keegan Dewitt’s eerie, atonal score is the pulse of blood underneath Catherine’s face. Sean Price Williams’ cinematography strikes an unnerving balance of warmth and horror in its woodland landscapes, unyielding close-ups, and off-kilter framing in which the tale’s affliction is set. Editor Robert Greene uses a dizzying mix of dissolves and fades (and one devastating, almost hilarious, smash-cut) to capture the ethereal nature of memory and a mind slipping. And sound designer/editor Ryan Price realizes physical spaces—be it a face or an interior—as subjective aural realities of the psyche. These, along with Alex Ross Perry’s phenomenal direction and disconcerting blocking, are the muscle and bone of Queen of Earth’s facade.
It is a risky decision to make a psychological horror film about depression and friendship with close-ups as establishing shots, yet Perry and crew find a way to tap into the truth of the face, of the flesh and the blood. If you gaze long enough, life’s narratives can be seen embodied in our cheekbones and skin, in our wrinkles and scars. Sometimes those stories are truly horrific.
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