From One Low Moment, 'Queen Of Earth' Follows A Swirl Of Pain 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Sean Price Williams/Courtesy of IFC Films Sean Price Williams/Courtesy of IFC Films 
 
 Without a second's hesitation, Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth dives right into its heroine's lowest moment, in medias res. The camera stays close to Catherine's face, as smears of mascara frame eyes alight with pain, anger and exhaustion; this has been going on a while and we're just seeing the end of it. Her boyfriend is breaking up with her, which is awful enough, but the timing makes it worse: She's still reeling from the death of her father, an artist who mentored her, and now the two central figures in her life are gone. This double whammy leads to a psychological breakdown that Perry chronicles with unsettling acuity, but the breakup and the death are merely the catalysts. The cause cuts much deeper. 
 
 Set over a week in a secluded vacation home in the Hudson River Valley, Queen of Earth is a typically dyspeptic film by Perry, whose four features as writer-director all pluck at raw nerves. Perry's last effort, Listen Up Philip, significantly darkened the high-toned literary comedies of directors like Noah Baumbach and Woody Allen, offering two authors whose combined egomania sweeps through their lives like a brush fire. Though the characters in Queen of Earth speak their minds as freely and caustically as those in Perry's other films, it deals with a different form of self-destruction, more internal than external. It's not about Catherine having too much grief and loss to bear, but about the way they expose her inability to process it all. Hardship runs through her psyche like alcohol filtered through a diseased liver. 
 
 Evoking a long list of cinematic antecedents — Ingmar Bergman's Persona and Woody Allen's Interiors chiefly, but the suffocating dramas of John Cassavetes and Rainer Werner Fassbinder are on the table, too — Queen of Earth settles on the thorny relationship between Catherine, played by Elisabeth Moss, and her best friend, Virginia, played by Katherine Waterston. "Best friend" should probably be in scare quotes, because they have reached a point where their closeness mostly applies to each of them knowing how to hurt the other the most. Virginia has invited Catherine out to her family retreat to help her find some peace and tranquility, but the hostility kicks in before they even get down the two-mile drive to the place. 
 
 For one, the house is haunted by memories of the previous summer, when Catherine and her boyfriend, James (Kentucker Audley), were locked in happy/sad co-dependency. Catherine was happier then, but the signs of long-term trouble were there, and returning to the scene a year later brings it all flooding back to her. Now she and Virginia have switched places: Catherine doesn't have a man in her life, but Virginia is flirting with Rich (Patrick Fugit), the boy next door, whose habit of casually breezing into the house seemed tolerable last year, but this time has Catherine raging over his flippancy and arrogance. It would be wrong, however, to hold Rich responsible for driving a wedge between the two old friends. They do that well enough on their own. 
 
 "You can get out of someone else's cycle," says Virginia, "but you can't get out of your own." That's as close to a thesis statement as Queen of Earth gets, and it could double as a warning to Perry, whose scripts cycle back to people saying awful things to each other. But here, his stylistic approach to the material makes all the difference: The film isn't a thriller per se, but it has the tension and atmosphere of one, only with emotional violence substituting for the physical kind. Catherine's deterioration feels dread-soaked and dangerous, and it happens with the agonizing deliberateness of a suspense director pulling the strings. Following up a smaller but no less powerful role in Listen Up Philip, Moss plays Catherine not as a woman weakened by circumstance, but as someone who lashes out as a desperate form of self-defense. 
 
 As usual for Perry, a strain of dark comedy runs through the melodrama — not to lighten the mood, exactly, but to bring a little texture and dimension to scenes of uncompromising torment. Perry isn't interested in convincing audiences to embrace prickly pears like Catherine and Virginia — or James and Rich, for that matter — but he does want them to see how friendships like theirs can diverge and how they process pain. We can't get out of their cycle in Queen of Earth, at least not until the credits release us. ||||| When you first see Catherine, she’s looking upward, her teary, blotchy face filling the frame. She’s suffering, all right, you better believe it, although she doesn’t seem to be doing a particularly good job of convincing the guy who’s mostly off-camera. She looks like a mess — pathetic, really, with her smeared black eye makeup and the tears that just keep pooling and dribbling. The funny thing is that with her wet raccoon eyes and red nose, Catherine — a sensational Elisabeth Moss — also looks like a sad clown. All that’s missing is the black velvet background. 
 
 By the time Catherine exits “Queen of Earth,” her frown has turned upside down and a grimace of abject misery has transformed into a vision of manic happiness as if she had traded in her tragedy mask for a comedy one. That it’s unclear which face is scarier, more unnerving, is in keeping with the director Alex Ross Perry’s gift for destabilization, for setting a mood only to violently upend it with cutting looks, dissonant musical chords and off-kilter camera angles. That Catherine seems to be swapping theater masks even as Ms. Moss brings tremendous depth of feeling to the role is in line with the arch self-consciousness of “Queen of Earth,” an art film in quotation marks. 
 
 Women’s tears — drops of joy and madness both — have nourished innumerable movies, art cinema included. The wellspring for Catherine’s opening waterworks is twofold: Her beloved father, a famous painter, has recently died, and her lover, James (Kentucker Audley, all smiles and spinelessness), is now leaving her for another woman. In many contemporary movies, the director would cut back and forth between Catherine and James’s faces during this scene, for a typical shot, reverse-shot exchange. Often, the camera would make like Tinker Bell, flitting between the characters to peek from behind one and gawp at the other. Mr. Perry avoids over-the-shoulder shots, but, as suggested by the opener that turns Catherine’s face into a landscape of pain, he likes claustrophobic close-ups. ||||| The star of Heathers, Girl Interrupted and Black Swan – an actress who has been reductively if accurately described as “the poster girl for the 1990s” – has been telling me about “this weird thing I do if I have to get emotional in a film. It always works.” She doesn’t just want me to take her word for it; she wants me to try it. Which I do because this is Los Angeles and nobody would bat an eyelid if you were to assume the lotus pose in the middle of a bar and start chanting, “Om shanti, shanti.” But also, simply, because Ryder wants me do it. 
 
 Something about the actress draws you in from the outset, making you want to befriend and protect her – both uncomfortable sensations for an interviewer. She talks in open-ended sentences, dipping in and out of whispers and veering off on tangents. 
 
 And at 42, in a battered cream leather jacket, vintage T-shirt and jeans, she’s still as fragile and translucent-skinned as she was at 18, as Cher’s pious teenage daughter in Mermaids, with the underlying grit of Lelaina, her character in the Generation X time-capsule that was Reality Bites, and the quiet wisdom of May Welland in Martin Scorsese 's The Age of Innocence. 
 
 Maybe she was too memorable in those early years, capturing the zeitgeist of that decade too well both professionally and personally, in her highly scrutinised relationships with Johnny Depp and Matt Damon. Or maybe that shoplifting incident in 2001, after which she was ordered to undergo psychological and drug counselling and then took time off from her career, has overshadowed the excellent work she has done since: her portrayal of the embittered, ageing ballerina in Black Swan and the cheating wife in The Dilemma. Either way, with a role as a mysterious financial PR in David Hare’s new BBC political thriller, Turks & Caicos, alongside Christopher Walken, Bill Nighy and Helena Bonham Carter, Ryder’s bemused by talk of a comeback. 
 
 
 
 Winona Ryder and Bill Nighy in David Hare's political thriller Turks & Caicos 
 
 “Only because they’ve been saying it for so long,” she says with a laugh. “And I’m, like, where was I? There’s a big part of me that just wants to do good work and not have that pressure. I don’t have any interest in being a movie star. And although I’d love to say that everything I’ve done has been a passion project – when of course I’ve done things just to work and I’ve done clonkers – you get a letter from David Hare, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God.’” The second part of Hare's Worricker Trilogy, Turks & Caicos follows Page Eight, which was shown in 2011. (All three parts will be shown on BBC2 from March 15th.) 
 
 Hare was astute enough to see that Ryder’s range as an actress should not be limited by her preternaturally youthful looks, but it’s easy to see how directors could still see that as a problem. In full make-up from Stella’s photo-shoot, Ryder somehow manages to look more like a teenager who’s ransacked her mother’s cosmetics drawer than a 42-year-old actress with two Oscar nominations under her belt. 
 
 “It was hard to find that transition to adult roles,” she concedes. “But I’m actually really enjoying getting older because I went through a period of time where I was technically old enough for roles but always associated with younger ones. The whole of my thirties was spent that way. Now that I’m in my forties it’s getting a little bit easier.” 
 
 It amuses rather than offends her that “people will point to these” – she smiles, indicating “the elevens”, or lines between her brows – “and say, ‘You might want to do something about those.’ I don’t want to knock anyone who does all that because it only bothers me when I see actresses I know, love and respect who have been talked into having something done. 
 
 "But what’s weird to me is that I’d rather just look my age. My favourite performances are by actresses like Bette Davis in All About Eve or Gena Rowlands in pretty much anything – performances that have nothing to do with age. As a teenager I worked on Indian reservations and it was such an incredible culture: the elders are so respected.” She shrugs and reaches for her tea. “I think it’s sad the way we treat older people here.” 
 
 
 
 Winona Ryder on location in Los Angeles. Dress by Preen (Amanda Friedman) 
 
 Ryder’s unconventional childhood has been exhaustively documented and occasionally used to explain the more disturbing events in her life, but the actress – christened Winona Laura Horowitz and named after the Minnesota city in which she was born – speaks fondly of the four years she spent in a commune in Elk, Northern California, from the age of seven. “It was pretty incredible. We were in 380 acres of redwoods and there was no electricity.” 
 
 Ryder started acting at 12, once her parents – bohemian intellectuals who were friends with the author Aldous Huxley, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg and LSD proselytiser Timothy Leary – moved to the nearby city of Petaluma. Any resentment she does harbour towards them is for setting too good an example of what marriage could be, she says. 
 
 “It’s crazy because they are still so in love after 43 years together – and I mean giddily in love. That set the bar so high for me. I think it may be why I never got married.” 
 
 She came close twice: once in the early 1990s, when, having got together with Depp on Edward Scissorhands, she became one half of the Brangelina of grunge, and later in 1998 when she and Damon became engaged, only to split up in 2000. For the past two years she has reportedly been dating a fashion designer, Scott Mackinlay Hahn, and, although she won’t discuss this today, she is open about her desire to have children, pulling out her phone and showing me a video of her new goddaughter. 
 
 “Look,” she says with a doting smile, “she even yawns. I mean talk about baby fever…” Then she pauses. “This is a little personal but I’m 42 and… Well, I was talking to my dad last year and saying, ‘What if I can’t have a kid?’ and he said, ‘There are other ways to have children in your life.’ That’s true – and I get these amazing doses with my brother’s kids. But I’ve got to stop listening to other people. It’s crazy the stuff women will tell you.” 
 
 For a moment we lament the scaremongering all childless women over 30 seem to be subjected to, and I urge her not to take it too seriously. But Ryder seems happy, healthy and settled – away from the madness of Hollywood, in San Francisco. 
 
 It was to San Francisco that she escaped when she took what we both diplomatically refer to throughout the interview – Ryder drawing inverted commas in the air – as her “hiatus”. Her parents had lived there for years (they subsequently moved to Canada after George W Bush was re-elected) and she wanted “to take a break, be home for a while and explore some other interests that I would have explored if I hadn’t become an actress”. She’s fascinated by constitutional law and sat in on a handful of lectures at Berkeley College. 
 
 She also went to see the environmental activist and life coach Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived in a 1,500-year-old Californian redwood for 738 days to prevent it from being cut down. “I climbed 180ft up to where she was but I only lasted six days up there – she lasted nearly two years.” But really, it was being in San Francisco that helped. There, she says, “people will be like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ in the street, because I’m a home-town girl.” It gave her the grounding she needed. 
 
 “Fame can be incredibly isolating,” Ryder says quietly. “Dangerously so. And I’ve definitely gone through that. There was a time when I would go for a hike and I wouldn’t even know that I was being photographed.” 
 
 Did any part of her enjoy it when it happened? Being the hottest actress out there, stepping out with the hottest men? She frowns. “It was actually pretty weird and traumatic. I was so young that I didn’t really understand what was going on. I always just really wanted to be a good actress.” 
 
 
 
 Winona Ryder in Heathers (1989), left, and Edward Scissorhands (1991) 
 
 In that respect, whatever the vehicle, Ryder has never compromised. She’s still the girl who was so determined to play the corruptible Veronica in the 1988 hit Heathers that she “literally pleaded” with the casting directors to be given a second chance. “My agent told me it would ruin my career and the first time I went in to audition they told me I wasn’t pretty enough so I got a makeover at the Beverly Center [shopping mall] and went straight back – because I just wanted to say the words, even if they hated me.” 
 
 These days, she waits for that “I have to do it” moment, turning down a fair number of dark, damaged roles, particularly anything involving children. After the abduction and murder of Polly Klaas – a 12-year-old from Petaluma for whom Ryder helped search, offering a $200,000 reward for her safe return – the actress’s sensitivity to the subject has been heightened. She is a member of the child-safety foundation set up in the wake of the crime, and at one point “very naively” asked a criminal psychiatrist what Hollywood could do to help. 
 
 “He said, ‘You know that the movies you guys make are like porn to these people?’ And it’s true that I get sent these scripts and they’re so dark,” she says. “I just got sent this one about paedophilia and it had a great cast but I read it and – maybe because of Polly – just thought, ‘I don’t want to be a part of that.’” 
 
 In this sense of responsibility – and in so many other ways – Ryder is atypical of her industry. She won’t tweet (“apparently studios look to see how many followers you have but even the term ‘followers’ is faintly creepy to me”), and hates the idea of a stylist telling her what to wear. “I’ve worn vintage dresses to the Oscars that I bought for $19 and at Sean Penn’s Haiti benefit the other night I wore a dress once owned by Audrey Hepburn that I’d worn to a friend’s première years ago – which apparently is some sort of no-no.” 
 
 She also prefers to spend her time unearthing Philip Roths and John Updikes at her favourite San Francisco bookshop, City Lights, than waste time reading populist fiction such as Fifty Shades of Grey. 
 
 “Do you know that I thought that book was about Wall Street because there’s a guy in a tie on the cover?” she says, giggling. “Actually, I met the woman who wrote it right here at Chateau Marmont. I was at this party upstairs talking to this woman and I said, ‘Oh, so is your book about financial trading?’” EL James was probably won over by this unabashed outlier. Where Ryder’s concerned, it’s hard not to be. 
 
 Follow @StellaMagazine ||||| From the idiotic drug-addict hokum Requiem for a Dream to the overrated, overwrought and over-hyped Black Swan, which I called “a lavishly staged Repulsion in toe shoes,” the films of wack job Darren Aronofsky have shown a dark passion for exploring twisted souls in torment. But nothing he’s done before to poison the ozone layer prepared me for mother!, an exercise in torture and hysteria so over the top that I didn’t know whether to scream or laugh out loud. Stealing ideas from Polanski, Fellini and Kubrick, he’s jerrybuilt an absurd Freudian nightmare that is more wet dream than bad dream, with the subtlety of a chainsaw. 
 
 This delusional freak show is two hours of pretentious twaddle that tackles religion, paranoia, lust, rebellion, and a thirst for blood in a circus of grotesque debauchery to prove that being a woman requires emotional sacrifice and physical agony at the cost of everything else in life, including life itself. That may or may not be what Aronofsky had in mind, but it comes as close to a logical interpretation as any of the other lunk-headed ideas I’ve read or heard. The reviews, in which a group of equally pretentious critics frustratingly search for a deeper meaning, are even nuttier than the film itself. Using descriptions like “hermeneutic structure,” “phantasmagoric fantasia,” “cinematic Rorsach test” and “extended scream of existential rage,” they sure know how to leave you laughing. 
 
 Although you will spend most of the painful, torturous and stressful two hours it takes to survive mother! trying to figure out what it’s all about, I advise you to ignore the reviews entirely and make up your own fantasy. One critic says it’s a satire on the chaos the dysfunctional world has been turned into by Donald Trump. Another says the title refers to the role played by Jennifer Lawrence, the director’s current personal squeeze and cinematic muse, whom he slobbers over in endlessly annoying close-ups that emphasize her flaws and rob the viewer of the power of self-discovery. One reviewer says she plays the quintessential Earth mother who works feverishly to restore balance to a planet Earth that is being constantly torn apart by wickedness and savagery. I love the review that compares the movie to the “lancing of a boil.” They all insist mother! is a metaphor for something, although they are not quite sure what it is. The only thing I agree with is that the film is indeed original. I admired the camerawork, the wide-angle close-ups of flaring nostrils, and the pandemonium of the crowd scenes in the second half of the film when it goes haywire and insanity reign. It’s an odd sensation to still remember moments of technical brilliance in a movie I never want to see again. The actress’s face occupies a full 66 minutes of the 120-minute running time, so I’ve seen quite enough of her, too. 
 
 Lawrence, a woman restrained almost to the point of madness, lives in a creepy, remote mansion in the middle of nowhere with her husband (Javier Bardem), a rugged poet who refuses to give her a baby or even take her to bed. (Can a sensitive poet with erectile function also be an alpha male? Just asking.) As she grows more understandably neurotic every day, the house is invaded by nameless strangers (Ed Harris and gorgeous Michelle Pfeiffer, looking unbelievably haggard) who interrupt the woman’s idyllic life with rude questions about sex, marriage, and why she isn’t trying harder to procreate. Every effort to throw them out is thwarted by her husband, who craves attention and idolatry from his fans. Then their two sons arrive, bringing violence and mayhem. Dishes smash. Furniture is demolished. A murder is committed. A mysterious bloodstain appears on the floor, opening up a hole to the story below. Soon the house in filled with mourners, all encouraged to stay as long as they like by the husband, who ignores his wife’s ensuing breakdown. Aronofsky derives tension from strange sounds and occurrences—a dying bee, a hot frying pan, an exploding light bulb covered with blood—filmed with unbearable tedium. As the uninvited guests grow in number, wrecking the plumbing, flooding the house with water, and littering the rooms with garbage, you begin to suspect there’s more to this depravity than misguided hospitality. Lawrence goes nuts before the audience does, displaying a remarkable talent for screaming “Stop!” at the top of her lungs—something I wished I had thought of first. 
 
 MOTHER! 
 
 (0/4 stars) 
 
 Directed by: Darren Aronofsky 
 
 Written by: Darren Aronofsky 
 
 Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer 
 
 Running time: 121 mins. 
 
 Just when you think she’s had all she can take, there’s more. A baby is born amidst blood-curdling screams of childbirth as Lawrence crawls over piles of corpses in labor, and unruly mobs carrying torches arrive in a scene that looks based on the Charlottesville riots. In the ultimate destruction of the female gender, Lawrence tries to save the baby she has always dreamed of to make life complete, but Fellini grotesques in preposterous Halloween costumes fill the screen and burn the house down. The New York Times critic arrogantly warns in his review: “Don’t listen to anyone who natters on about how intense or disturbing it is.” Sorry, pal, but a mob that burns a screaming baby and its mother alive, then turns cannibal, eats the baby and rips its heart out to flush down the toilet while Patti Smith sings about the end of the world pretty much fits my definition of both “intense” and “disturbing.” What’s yours? 
 
 Nothing about mother! makes one lick of sense as Darren Aronofsky’s corny vision of madness turns more hilarious than scary. With so much crap around to clog the drain, I hesitate to label it the “Worst movie of the year” when “Worst movie of the century” fits it even better.
– Ever wonder what a psychological breakdown looks like up close? See for yourself in Queen of Earth from Alex Ross Perry. It follows two friends, one of whom has recently lost her father to suicide and her lover to another woman. Here's what critics are saying: Queen of Earth is a "startling, razor-sharp thriller" that might solidify Perry as "the most skillful young writer-director working in the United States today," writes Calum Marsh at Village Voice. "Largely a chamber piece for two women—Katherine Waterston and Elisabeth Moss, both excellent in hugely demanding roles—the film also welcomes, and indeed earns, Persona comparisons. This is vigorous, frightening, electrifying stuff." Scott Tobias at NPR was rapt all the way through. The film focuses on the "thorny relationship" between Catherine (Moss) and Virginia (Waterston) over a week. It "isn't a thriller per se, but it has the tension and atmosphere of one, only with emotional violence substituting for the physical kind," he writes. "Catherine's deterioration feels dread-soaked and dangerous, and it happens with the agonizing deliberateness of a suspense director pulling the strings." Waterston "easily holds your attention," but it's Moss, "with her intimate expressivity, who annihilates you from first tear to last crushing laugh," writes Manohla Dargis at the New York Times. She's "sensational," and "brings tremendous depth of feeling" to her difficult role, Dargis adds. As for the movie, it's "alternately mesmerizing and suffocating … bringing you uncomfortably close to the action ... only to shove you away." Joe Neumaier agrees "this is Moss' show." She's "excellent as a woman whose mind is unraveling" in a film that "burrows so deep into a psyche that it's scary." The "intense" work "may seem minor but is more than memorable" as it explores "memory, relationships and codependency, between both friends and lovers," he writes at the New York Daily News.