Queen of Earth

If you're gonna go hard to the closeup, you're gonna want to work with a face like Elisabeth Moss's.

"Queen of Earth" isn't a laugh riot, not by a long shot. But it is a good movie, and a fascinating study of descent.

Perry's movie may not be easy to watch, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't.

Writer-director Alex Ross Perry conjures such a strong atmosphere around his characters -- and Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston are so powerful in the leads --that one gets sucked into their emotional conflict.

Perry may never make a movie for the masses, whoever they are. But his truest work burrows into weird, blackly comic places few other filmmakers would dare explore.

The mood is akin to Ingmar Bergman's Persona or Roman Polanski's Repulsion. So don't watch expecting a barrel of laughs. You might, though, detect hints of dark comedy.

The film succeeds as a character study, but it could have had more of a story.

It makes for a slightly muddled palette, but one that, like one of those lenticular pictures that changes depending on the angle it's viewed from, can seem either darkly cynical or harrowing.

A darkly funny and increasingly disturbing portrait of a young woman's descent into madness after the traumatic loss of her artist father.

It displays some of the navel-gazing impulses of the mumblecore movement; it's no surprise to see that mumble-originator Joe Swanberg serves as a producer.