Screens August 13, 15 

Brutal close-ups. Pregnant exchanges. Half-remembered flashbacks. With these, Queen of Earth makes us witness to the near dissolution of a friendship and, almost certainly, a mind. In this stylistic departure for rising US indie darling Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip), the writer-director employs washed-out yet shimmering 16mm cinematography to document the days struggling artist Catherine (Mad Men’s Elizabeth Moss) spends at the cabin of her bestie Ginny (Katherine Waterston) as she reels from an unfortunate trio of cuckolding, parental death and disabling self-doubt. As the two friends circle each other, engaging in caustic bouts of ad-hoc psychoanalysis every so often, it’s hard not to detect an echo of the claustrophobic 1960s cinema of Bergman and Polanski. In some ways, the film could in fact be seen as a tribute, both to certain kinds of movies about women, and to the real-life characters who watch in quiet horror as a friend slowly, memorably implodes. Still, by the time the film comes to its chilling freeze-frame ending, there is a creeping sense that Perry can’t quite escape the shadow of his touchstones.