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Trailer Watch: Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth
From the copyright notice to the ominous voiceover, the latest trailer for Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth plunges us into the world of ’60s/’70s arthouse psychological horror — mid-period Bergman, Polanski and Allen’s Interiors, for example. Here, Elizabeth Moss (Mad Men, Top of the Lake) retreats to the lakeside home of her best friend, played by Katherine Waterston (Inherent Vice), to recuperate after twin emotional jolts. There’s history, however — the lingering after effects of another weekend at this house spent one year earlier. Wrote Scott Foundas in Variety:
The flashbacks in Queen of Earthh are like little Proustian splinters that lodge under the skin of the characters as they run their hands along the bannisters of the past. Perry, who excels at finding cinematic analogs for the time-shifting narrative devices common in literature, gives the movie the superstructure of a diary, delineated into daily chapters, and within each of those chapters moves nimbly back and forth between now and then. Whenever we are, the small wooden house is a constant, rarely parted from and seeming ever more like a Bunuelian prison from which the characters are unable to leave. The wonderfully eerie tone (enhanced by composer Keegan DeWitt’s minimalist, atonal piano score) keeps you on a razor’s edge of uncertainty as to whether a murder or a reconciliation — or both — lurks just around the bend.
Queen of Earth opens August 26 from IFC.
