It’s rare that a movie prompts the use of the word “snide.” But that’s what a lot of the dialogue in “Queen of Earth” is: snide. “You click your tongue and you revel in the affairs of others,” Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) jabs at Rich (Patrick Fugit) like a modernized Shakespearean trash-talker. She resents his presence in Virginia’s (Katherine Waterston) parents’ house because this was supposed to be a calming retreat, where Catherine can nurse the wounds of her breakup and hang out with her bestie, Virginia, to whom she clings so tightly that she doesn’t want anyone else to call her “Ginny,” as if they’re unworthy. In this thriller of social unease, everyone speaks with ash while leaving an aftertaste of pure metal.
Writer/director Alex Ross Perry’s last movie, “Listen Up Philip,” also hinged on meanness, but Philip’s (Jason Schwartzman) cruelty was astonishingly direct. So much of “Queen of Earth,” which periodically flashes back to the previous summer when Virginia was alone and Catherine brought her boyfriend to the lake house, is passive-aggressive, even between so-called best friends. And a sense of possible destruction, more like emotional violence, hangs over everything—Catherine, whose famous-artist father recently took his own life, claims that family is different than friends as far as the ability to end relationships; Virginia disagrees, insisting, “I love eliminating those enemies from every aspect of my life.” “Queen of Earth” is a devastating exploration of what unconditional love really means, especially between friends who don’t like each other much when things are less than happy.
Perry might have included someone here who wasn’t so confrontational; eventually things are uniformly heated to the point of contrivance, and a late moment of over-explaining the notion of closeness between friends sometimes relying on the willingness to give when the other needs something underestimates viewers’ ability to get there on their own. But the filmmaker creates a bitter, chilling mood, the score’s strings less musical instruments than choking devices. Moss, so good in last year’s “The One I Love” (if you still haven’t seen that, pull it up on Netflix now, dammit), is a simmering pot cooking a grenade, daring anyone to stick around when things get really messy. And the film understands the many deliberate and unintentional tricks people play with language to bring others close or push them away. Catherine meets a man who tells her to be careful, since you never know. “You never know what?” she asks. His reply: “Exactly.”
Alex Ross Perry will be in person Saturday at Music Box for post-screening Q&As at 7 p.m. (moderated by producer Joe Swanberg) and 9:30 p.m.
3.5 stars (out of four)
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