The Best Cinema Goes Beyond Mere Storytelling

For a viewer looking back decades from now at the movies of this time, Alex Ross Perry’s new film “Queen of Earth,” which opened last week and is expanding to theatres nationwide today, will serve as an example of the sort of complex modernism that has become both common coin and rare treasure among the best filmmakers. It’s a story so simple that it’s hardly a story—two women who are best friends spend a week together in a country house and learn to hate each other. Along the way, Perry’s variations on the theme of their relationship reach rare extremes of emotional experience, and introduce extraordinarily nuanced perceptions of the behavioral and psychological complexity of fleeting moments. But for all the impassioned and discerning correlation of inner and outer lives, Perry never distills the characters’ conflicts—with each other, with others, and with themselves—into problems with clearly arising causes or readily discernible resolutions.