Moss plays a woman reeling from a breakup and her father’s death.
Sometimes we just want a nice getaway at the lake. And sometimes what we get instead is a shattering, claustrophobic chamber drama. That’s the lesson of Queen of Earth, which stars Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men) as Catherine, an emotionally fragile woman who’s reeling from a recent breakup and the death of her father, a successful artist whose affairs she looked after. She retreats to the family lake house of her friend Virginia (Katherine Waterston), but the visit proves disastrous. Relations between the women are tense, not least because Virginia starts getting cozy with a young man (Patrick Fugit) who’s staying at a house nearby.
Queen of Earth was written and directed by Alex Ross Perry, and the film reunites him with Moss, who costarred in his previous film, Listen Up Philip. That was an enjoyable if troubling comedy of manners about insufferable intellectuals, in the Woody Allen or Noah Baumbach mode. There are many fewer laughs in Queen of Earth, a spiky psychological thriller whose elliptical dialogue and jagged chronology are unsettling. Moss is triumphantly good as Catherine, especially in a chaotic party scene where she seemingly tips over into madness.
