Alex Ross Perry
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The creeping zooms of Sean Price Williams' 16mm camera close in on the faces of Moss and studio turned indie starlet Katherine Waterston, framed in "Persona"-like juxtaposition to instill in us the sickening feeling that these two women are two halves of a whole, as if some unholy astrological alignment were bringing them together to break all hell loose.
Perry’s psychological drama plays like a self-conscious American variation on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.
Perry has acknowledged in interviews his desire to draw ideas for his own women-on-the-verge story from Polanski, from Ingmar Bergman (most obviously "Persona"), from Fassbinder's "Marriage of Maria Braun."
A deep-dish cinephile with a pronounced affection for late 1960s/early 1970s alt-Hollywood cinema, Perry is working this time in a style that seems equally influenced by doppelganger narratives like Bergman’s “Persona” and Brian De Palma’s “Sisters,” as well as by the claustrophobic domestic terror of “Repulsion” and Chantal Akerman’s seminal “Jeanne Dielman.”
Clearly Perry has a bookish nature: Though his new movie plays like a cousin to Ingmar Bergman’s gorgeously broken Persona, it has the intimate contours of a smartly conceived anthology short story, one in which a woman’s unraveling gains psychological impact from a concentrated time and place.
Largely a chamber piece for two women — Katherine Waterston and Elisabeth Moss, both excellent in hugely demanding roles — the film also welcomes, and indeed earns, Persona comparisons.
Perry tears shamelessly from the pages of the hysterical women canon, keying into Polanski's "Repulsion" and "The Tenant," Altman's "Images" starring Susannah York, a sort of proto-"3 Women" about a splintering female psyche, with shades of Bergman and, yes, Woody Allen's own strained Bergman homage "Interiors."
Joining the esteemed company of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" (1965), Ingmar Begman's "Persona" (1966), Robert Altman's "3 Women" (1977), David Lynch's " Mulholland Drive " (2001), and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" as the latest artistic watermark delving into potentially shifting identities and ultimate madness, the film mesmerizes on an unshakable level from its volatile opening sob to its diabolical closing cackle.
Perhaps that's why this dual character study, featuring a balls out performance from Moss and an eerie one from Waterston feels like so many other movies, everything from "3 Women" to "Your Sister's Sister" to "Rosemary's Baby" and "Repulsion," yet defies coming into its own focus.
The scenes of conflict between two women in a confined setting recall several other movies, including Robert Altman’s 3 Women, Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female (a more melodramatic variant on the same theme), and even Ingmar Bergman’s classic Persona.
Queen of Earth nods to everything from Persona and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s nervous breakdown melodramas to Robert Altman’s Images and 3 Women (though Roman Polanski’s absurdly funny, apartment-confined thrillers loom largest).
This small, nuanced story evokes art film classics like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and Robert Altman’s 3 Women with its story of two women who love and hate (and sometimes become) each other near water, but Perry also draws a lot on the mood, pacing, music and look of 1970s horror cinema.
She allows a plate of salad to rot on her bedside table, verbally abuses Rich, and brings a house party to a standstill after suffering nightmarish visions of the partygoers laughing and clawing at her—a scene that serves as a Polanski twofer, referencing both Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby.
He uses techniques familiar from horror movies like Rosemary’s Baby - eerie music, jarring close-ups, and sudden flashbacks.
Catherine unravels in ways visually recalling Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" and, in a feverish party sequence, "Rosemary's Baby."
It's the one time when Perry overtly aims for more of a horror feel, perhaps riffing on "Rosemary's Baby" a little bit, and it doesn't quite work with the rest of the film.
But the dip into Rosemary’s Baby-esque horror is perhaps too precipitous to fully reclaim its sense of seriousness.
Perhaps that's why this dual character study, featuring a balls out performance from Moss and an eerie one from Waterston feels like so many other movies, everything from "3 Women" to "Your Sister's Sister" to "Rosemary's Baby" and "Repulsion," yet defies coming into its own focus.
Repulsion (1965)
Directed by Roman Polanski
influenced Queen of Earth (2015)
Characters Themes Visuals
If you’re looking for an actress to re-enact Catherine Deneuve’s memorable descent into madness as depicted in the 1965 classic Repulsion, Elisabeth Moss is a fine choice.
Perry tears shamelessly from the pages of the hysterical women canon, keying into Polanski's "Repulsion" and "The Tenant," Altman's "Images" starring Susannah York, a sort of proto-"3 Women" about a splintering female psyche, with shades of Bergman and, yes, Woody Allen's own strained Bergman homage "Interiors."
Drawing from deep wells on cinephilia and, it seems, cynicism, Perry is relentless toward his characters, and his depiction of cinematic female hysteria, somewhat after the fashion of Roman Polanski, is in line with the coruscating fevers of “Knife In the Water” and “Repulsion.”
Catherine unravels in ways visually recalling Roman Polanski's "Repulsion" and, in a feverish party sequence, "Rosemary's Baby."
A deep-dish cinephile with a pronounced affection for late 1960s/early 1970s alt-Hollywood cinema, Perry is working this time in a style that seems equally influenced by doppelganger narratives like Bergman’s “Persona” and Brian De Palma’s “Sisters,” as well as by the claustrophobic domestic terror of “Repulsion” and Chantal Akerman’s seminal “Jeanne Dielman.”
Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth is a ferocious psychological dramedy that exudes an autumnal aura of supple, ineffably erotic regret, often suggesting what might have happened if Ingmar Bergman remade Repulsion out on his beloved Fårö.
Perry tears shamelessly from the pages of the hysterical women canon, keying into Polanski's "Repulsion" and "The Tenant," Altman's "Images" starring Susannah York, a sort of proto-"3 Women" about a splintering female psyche, with shades of Bergman and, yes, Woody Allen's own strained Bergman homage "Interiors."
Perry has also cited the influence of Woody Allen 's "Interiors," which was a studious, self-conscious Bergman rip-off.
(Perry himself has also cited Woody Allen’s “Interiors” as a key influence.)
The sense that the two women have exchanged roles, or that in some way, each is the other, is alluded to in shots that show them gazing in the same direction, side by side—echoes not just of Persona, but of a later riff on Bergman, Woody Allen’s Interiors (one of the Seventies influences that Perry has acknowledged, along with Robert Altman’s Images).
It’s like Woody Allen following up the amusing “Annie Hall” with the cold and distancing “Interiors.”
Its close quarters call to mind cinema in enclosed spaces like Woody Allen’s terminally-solemn Interiors or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s classic dramas Martha and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
But the guiding spirit here is less Ray Bradbury and more Roman Polanski, whose influence Perry has credited in interviews along with Robert Altman, specifically the latter director’s 1972 feature Images.
Perry tears shamelessly from the pages of the hysterical women canon, keying into Polanski's "Repulsion" and "The Tenant," Altman's "Images" starring Susannah York, a sort of proto-"3 Women" about a splintering female psyche, with shades of Bergman and, yes, Woody Allen's own strained Bergman homage "Interiors."
Perry cites Polanski as the greatest living director, and he and customary cinematographer Sean Price Williams and regular editor Robert Greene join with Elisabeth Moss in going beyond a lashing of Robert Altman’s “Images,” to a heaping helping of a breakdown by a depressed woman in a remote East Coast location.
The sense that the two women have exchanged roles, or that in some way, each is the other, is alluded to in shots that show them gazing in the same direction, side by side—echoes not just of Persona, but of a later riff on Bergman, Woody Allen’s Interiors (one of the Seventies influences that Perry has acknowledged, along with Robert Altman’s Images).
Queen of Earth nods to everything from Persona and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s nervous breakdown melodramas to Robert Altman’s Images and 3 Women (though Roman Polanski’s absurdly funny, apartment-confined thrillers loom largest).
The scenes of conflict between two women in a confined setting recall several other movies, including Robert Altman’s 3 Women, Barbet Schroeder’s Single White Female (a more melodramatic variant on the same theme), and even Ingmar Bergman’s classic Persona.
A montage of perfectly spot-on mock first-edition covers à la The Royal Tenenbaums introduces the viewer to Ike’s vast oeuvre, including such classics as Madness & Woman and The Audit, and his very telling failed attempt at expanding his range, A Woman’s Perspective.
(This movie beats The Royal Tenenbaums for best fake book covers.)
You’ll get a tang of The Squid and the Whale, and echoes of The Royal Tenenbaums: the latter because the film essentially “is” a novel, narrated by Bogosian’s off-screen omniscient storyteller (earnestly intoning what sounds like a very stodgy, old-fashioned slab of psychological realism), and because it too contains an array of apocryphal book jackets, brilliantly crafted by Teddy Blanks, who has also designed credits in perfect Seventies paperback cover typeface.
These early passages of “Listen Up Philip” rush at the viewer in short, staccato scenes accompanied by the running voiceover of an omniscient narrator (Eric Bogosian, a la Alec Baldwin in “The Royal Tenenbaums”), which creates the sense that Philip is forever transfiguring his life into fiction, even as it is happening to him in the moment.
Loaded with voiceover and literary satire reminiscent of “The Royal Tenenbaums,” “Listen Up Philip” overdoes it with Eric Bogosian’s narration.
Queen of Earth uses these themes to pulpy effect, plugging in the paranoid claustrophobia of Rosemary’s Baby and Michael Winner’s The Sentinel, as well as the watery spectre of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, into its wheelhouse.
Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)
Directed by John D. Hancock
influenced Queen of Earth (2015)
Themes Visuals
Queen of Earth uses these themes to pulpy effect, plugging in the paranoid claustrophobia of Rosemary’s Baby and Michael Winner’s The Sentinel, as well as the watery spectre of Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, into its wheelhouse.
The calmly eerie house-by-the-lake setting exactly resembles the places where terrible things happen to women in Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, The Last House On The Left and I Spit On Your Grave, and a climactic party freak-out shifts into full-on terror with ghoul-like guests – making the point that a few wrong words can make being ordinarily miserable feel like being trapped in a nightmare movie.
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Directed by John Cassavetes
influenced Queen of Earth (2015)
Themes
Primed for madness under the thumb of her father, who obviously had been wrestling with depression, Catherine goes into "Repulsion" meets "Black Swan" meets "A Woman Under the Influence"-style crazy town, and if you're going to do this kind of movie, you have to deliver the paranoid, hallucinatory freakout scene.
The obvious antecedent for Queen of Earth is John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, but Perry draws more extensively from what seems like an entire subgenre of two-handed women-in-crisis dramas, the most pointed of which come directly from the era between the ’60s and the ’70s that he cites as the most influential to his work. 1 Shot on 16mm and announced through stylised titles in bold red cursive (designed by Teddy Blanks, who also designed the memorable book covers of Listen Up Philip, glimpsed here in Ginny’s grasps and stocking her bookshelves), Queen of Earth is conscious of what informs its narrative and aesthetic, whilst never leaning on kitsch or lazy imitation.
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)
Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu
influenced Her Smell (2019)
Visuals
All this woman-on-woman psychodrama, combined with the kinetic camerawork snaking around the backstage setting, makes Her Smell feel like Birdman meets The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant .
While lacking the same technical prowess, such as the extended single takes, the film’s bleak atmosphere is comparable to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman or ( The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance ) (2014).
The Ghost Writer (2010)
Directed by Roman Polanski
influenced Listen Up Philip (2014)
Plot Characters
The disgruntled novelist’s wife in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer—of which Perry’s film is a loose adaptation in all but name—could have been referring to Friedman or Ike Zimmerman, his much older, equally miserable mentor, when she says, of her husband, that “not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of.”
Yes, it’s a riff on Roth’s novel “The Ghost Writer,” a story about a young writer, Philip Lewis Friedman, who accepts an invitation to the rural home of an established (though now blocked) elder writer.
Playfully mixing around component parts from Roth’s The Ghost Writer, Perry borrows the setup and then veers off into another direction altogether.
He’s a little bit Roth himself, in a cruel way, and a great deal of Roth’s fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, and of E.I. Lonoff, the literary mentor to young Zuckerman in Roth’s The Ghost Writer.
Early on, Zimmerman invites Philip to stay at his country retreat, a situation recalling that of The Ghost Writer, in which young Zuckerman is a weekend guest at the rural house of an older writer, in some ways modeled on Roth’s own hero Bernard Malamud.
Perry tears shamelessly from the pages of the hysterical women canon, keying into Polanski's "Repulsion" and "The Tenant," Altman's "Images" starring Susannah York, a sort of proto-"3 Women" about a splintering female psyche, with shades of Bergman and, yes, Woody Allen's own strained Bergman homage "Interiors."
Much like Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth and Robert Eggers’ The Witch , Midsommar belongs to a growing series of films by anointed male auteurs using cult homages to explore female sexuality – yet can sometimes seem contrived in intuiting the desires of their subjects.
Hewing close to a modern New York classic a la “Frances Ha,” the acerbic, witty, erudite echoes of Noah Baumbach and his belligerent characters are discernible.
If even a New Wave-era novelty like Frank Sidebottom can inspire a Michael Fassbender movie and the sticky-backed signifiers of American hardcore can be plastered all over Ten Thousand Saints (2015) and Green Room (2015), then it’s high time for a Temple of the Dog biopic.
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)
Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder
influenced Queen of Earth (2015)
Visuals
Its close quarters call to mind cinema in enclosed spaces like Woody Allen’s terminally-solemn Interiors or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s classic dramas Martha and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
Its close quarters call to mind cinema in enclosed spaces like Woody Allen’s terminally-solemn Interiors or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s classic dramas Martha and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
A deep-dish cinephile with a pronounced affection for late 1960s/early 1970s alt-Hollywood cinema, Perry is working this time in a style that seems equally influenced by doppelganger narratives like Bergman’s “Persona” and Brian De Palma’s “Sisters,” as well as by the claustrophobic domestic terror of “Repulsion” and Chantal Akerman’s seminal “Jeanne Dielman.”