Queen Of Earth

Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) is reeling. Right from the start, her existence is frantic. She's jut discovered that her long-term boyfriend has been cheating on her. For months. Since before her father's suicide. He can't cope with her neediness, with the intensity of her grief, he says, and it's true that she feels everything very intensely, but it's not clear that this is something she can control. What she might try to control is how she responds to it. Agoraphobic and veering between anxiousness and malice, what she needs is quiet time and support from somebody who understands what she's going through. So she turns to her best friend, someone who has also experienced tragedy but whose reaction to it was so different that she has no idea how to connect.

In a world where professed friendship is often assumed to be trivial, one of the factors used to give it credence is longevity - but how many long-term friendships really stand the test of time? Catherine and Virginia (Katherine Waterston) were close in childhood. Latterly, it seems that friendship has become a habit, an assumed thing. In the summertime, they go out to stay at the lake house that belongs to Virginia's father. We see flashbacks to their time there the previous year, before Catherine's life went awry, and they're laughing and happy, but what passes between them has little substance. Catherine's mental disintegration throws the supposed friendship into sharp relief, making us wonder if there was ever a time when t could have withstood real strain.

Unable at times to focus on anything beyond her own pain, Catherine is spiky, obnoxious, continually picking away at Virginia's self-esteem, yet the flashbacks hint that there has always been a degree of this in their relationship, the sort of cultivated humour that borders on bullying. Virginia, too, is self-centred, and tries to fend off her friend's more serious appeals with platitudes, unaware of the privilege in her own situation. When things really start to fall apart, she and others present don't even know the basics of what to do, a fact that tells us a lot about the limits of their social circles. Virginia tries to be supportive but she, too, takes cruel swipes at her friend - she's just subtler about it.

Keegan DeWitt's attention-grabbing melodramatic score tells us something of the impact Catherine's illness is having on her and the impact her behaviour is having on others, but it also points backwards to the grand melodramas of the Forties and Fifties when Hollywood first made a serious attempt to explore mental illness. The intense close-ups and Moss' unrepentant shrillness also belong to this tradition, creating a space for women to express emotion without shame, a female dominated space where such sentiments cannot be labelled hysteria and laughed aside. Here it's Catherine who does the laughing, in two shocking scenes that bookend the film. Moss throws everything she has into the role, dominating the film, yet Waterston's carefully understated supporting performance is equally powerful in its way. The sorrow that Virginia reveals when she finally realises how wrong things have gone doesn't seem to be just for Catherine or their friendship, but for herself, shackled as she is by normality, sanity, and the ongoing dishonesty they require.

There's no doubt that Catherine is exploitative, that she has always been exploitative, yet Virginia appears to be drawing something from this for herself, living off her friend's vibrancy. As Catherine's delusions are broken down, she too loses something vital.

Heavily stylised and sometimes overly self-conscious, Queen Of Earth doesn't pretend to be simple observation. It uses heightened emotion like camouflage as it develops its themes. Men drift in and out of the picture, almost incidental. The background of trees and water takes on a primal quality that feeds into the performances, adding a Jungian quality to the film. Creating a picture of her friend, Catherine seems to be looking for a Laura, somebody to satisfy her unfocused obsessive feelings, but Virginia keeps on failing to be the idol she's imagined. The women's separation highlights their aloneness. In exploring madness, Queen Of Earth strips away delusion and leaves us with something raw.