Queens of the Qing Dynasty Review: Pushing Against the Limits of Control

Set at a remote hospital in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, during the dead of winter, writer-director Ashley McKenzie’s Queens of the Qing Dynasty has an accordingly cold and clinical feel. At the start, we’re introduced to suicidal 18-year-old Star (Sarah Walker) as doctors swirl around her bed and beseech her to drink activated charcoal as an antidote to the poison that she recently ingested. The inherent chaos of this scene is depicted through a succession of rigidly framed shots—mostly close-ups of faces, hands, and the various objects that those hands interact with—while the rhythmic beeping of hospital equipment merges with a glitchy electronic musical score, and the effect is hypnotic in its detachment.

The film’s aesthetic, which McKenzie’s similarly employed to document the lives of an addict couple in 2016’s Werewolf, is evocatively keyed to Star’s neurodiversity. If she engages with others, her responses are slow and robotic; at one point, she even records her temporary lodgings through an iPhone with an almost alien curiosity. This often takes on a humorous effect, as in a therapy session that becomes dominated by Star’s requests for Dexedrine, or a peculiar coughing fit from which she quickly and nonchalantly recovers. When one doctor says that he remembers her from the last time she was at the hospital, Star says that she doesn’t remember him. “Must have been in nervous breakdown mode,” she monotones.

The one person who does break through to Star is An (Ziyin Zheng), a hospital volunteer assigned to hang out with her during her stay. A genderfluid Chinese expatriate with style and a beautiful falsetto singing voice to match (lovingly demonstrated during an impromptu rendition of Celine Dion’s “A New Day Has Come”), An seems as open as Star seems closed off. Nonetheless, the two are slowly taken in by each other’s idiosyncrasies and a delicate friendship develops between them, though Queens of the Qing Dynasty wisely avoids falling into the treacly narrative beats of a stereotypical cross-cultural two-hander.

Star has a traumatic history, but beyond one harrowing confession of a troubling domestic situation, the film elects to stay murky about the specifics. Consequently, Star is never solely defined by her past wounds, with Walker, in a rivetingly alert performance, eliciting our sympathies through the subtlest of expressions. An, meanwhile, is fiercely establishing their blossoming feminine identity (“I want to be a trophy wife,” they divulge to Star, in reference to the savvy and cutthroat concubines of the title) while struggling to gain permanent residence in a country that seems to have no use for them other than insignificant labor. “No matter how many degrees you have, they still treat you like a kid,” An sardonically states while commiserating with friends about Canada’s degrading immigration policies.

Queens of the Qing Dynasty, then, blossoms into a moving story about two people trapped by the institutions that they’re beholden to. Throughout, McKenzie cannily enhances this sense of suffocation through her use of the squarish Academy ratio. Even as the film eventually shifts outside of the hospital walls, when Star is given another chance to live on her own, the compositions constantly position them in isolation to the world around them.

And yet, a lovely warmth gradually and slyly emerges from Queens of the Qing Dynasty as Star and An find an unconventional and often wordless rapport, as if in reaction to the film’s constrictive atmosphere. Sometimes, this comes out through clever uses of modern technology, with McKenzie integrating texting and social media as vital lifelines between her main characters. In one cathartic sequence toward the end, Star and An strap on VR headsets and journey into a realm that’s exhilarating for its liberating kineticism and lush color palette, a marked opposition to the film’s predominantly white and drab settings. Queens of the Qing Dynasty may posit a world where harsh government protocols foster default modes of segregation and fractured communication, but it also realizes the thrilling potential for others to psychically seep into our orbits to help navigate the arduous path ahead.