Queens of the Qing Dynasty (Ashley McKenzie, 2022)

One of last year's more acclaimed films, Ashley McKenzie's Queens of the Qing Dynasty is difficult, raw, and at times repellent. Tonally, and in terms of rhythm and pacing, it's very nearly the opposite of McKenzie's 2016 debut Werewolf. Set in Nova Scotia like Queens, Werewolf was an all-too-close examination of two methadone addicts, their lives always on the verge of spinning out of control, with everything focused on getting the next fix. By contrast, Queens manages to be much slower, even somnambulent at times, while keeping the viewer in the throes of the same relentless anxiety. If a film can be likened to a suicide watch, that's very much the experience of Queens of the Qing Dynasty.

As the film begins, we are watching Star (Sarah Walker) being coaxed by emergency room staff to drink her charcoal beverage. She has ingested poison in what seems to be her latest suicide attempt, and while she is conscious, she's confused and unresponsive. This makes sense under the circumstances, but once Star is stabilized and admitted to the psych ward, her demeanor hardly changes. We never discover Star's diagnosis. She mentions ADHS and bipolar symptoms, but it seems like something more. Is she on the spectrum? A catatonic schizophrenic? Has she suffered brain damage?

Since we know so little about Star, her flat affect and disjointed speech patterns are disconcerting, and as a viewer I never got used to them. Which is to say, I recognized Star as a highly vulnerable person in need, but if she were a real person I would've made up any excuse to get away from her. And this seems to be McKenzie's point, at least partially. Star is about to age out of the foster care system, she has no family, and is incapable of taking care of herself or living on her own. She is a person for whom homelessness, or worse, is the most likely outcome. And although it's not correct to say that she refuses help, she deflects it, her damaged state making it nearly impossible for her to register any intended intervention.

At the heart of Queens is the relationship that develops between Star and An (Ziyin Zheng), the social work student who volunteers at the hospital and is charged with being Star's minder. An, a queer Chinese immigrant working on attaining Canadian citizenship, is preternaturally patient, and finds that they appreciates Star's disarming honesty and complete lack of filter. The two of them almost immediately forge private jokes and a personal code, referring to one another as "evildoers" and recognizing that they share a strong (albeit nonsexual) chemistry.

The vast majority of Queens operates within this resolutely strange, claustrophobic relationship. Star and An are already contained within the hospital walls, at least at first. But McKenzie's stylistic approach, largely made up of extreme close-ups and off-kilter angles, produces a constricted emotional space that is both inviting and off-putting in its extreme intimacy. The film displays this friendship as a lifeline for two people at difficult junctures of their lives, but McKenzie is careful to show their basic asymmetry. An leaves Star over a day or two to spend time with a prospective boyfriend (Nidhin Kh), and Star, who has been temporarily relocated to a motel room, calls him over 60 times, leaving endless, repetitive messages. ("If I give you the address, are you comin'?")

The bond between Star and An is perhaps as noteworthy for its boundaries, particularly those set by An. Star proposes that they marry to help them to help secure their residency, but An explains that it wouldn't work. We know little about An's background, except that their nonbinary, possibly trans identity is a complicated matter back in China. But Star's "secret" involving her own past with an abusive brother suggests that creating a family is precisely what they don't need to do. They need an entirely different structure of care.

There are experimental touches throughout Queens that aren't really as meaningful or necessary as McKenzie probably wants them to be. The occasional use of superimpositions and echoes to convey Star's dissociative moments, or the rather aggressive soundtrack, represent big swings from an aesthetic standpoint. For a film of such modest means, Queens strives for a visionary atmosphere. But the otherworldly performances of Walker and Zheng are enough of a special effect to render these touches redundant. The animated sequences produced for the film, with their vaguely R. Crumb figures and comic loops of bodily mutilation, were particularly tin-eared.

Still, I am hard-pressed to think of another film I've seen that's quite like Queens of the Qing Dynasty. In its unswerving alignment with a psyche askew from conventional reality, it shares certain traits with Lodge Kerrigan's films, in particular Clean, Shaven and Keane. But this itself is instructive. Kerrigan's mentally ill male characters are able to jostle their way through the ordinary world by dint of nervous aggression. Star, by contrast, is an open wound, someone so battered by the world that she no longer fears her own eradication, instead perceiving it as rather inevitable. McKenzie is wise to end Queens on an inconclusive note, since it will take more than An to keep her alive. But it's a start.