Images (1972)
Directed by Robert Altman
While holidaying in Ireland, a pregnant children's author finds her mental state becoming increasingly unstable, resulting in paranoia, hallucinations, and visions of a doppelgänger.
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What critics compared Images to
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 Lodge has echoes of gothic-horror drawn from a surfeit of films like The Innocents (1961), The Nightcomers (1971), Night Watch (1973), Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964), Images (1972), The Others (2001), and The Shining (1980) although these films work better as atmospheric clues to the story rather than outright references.
Like Altman in Images (1972), Woody plays with names.