Catherine has entered a particularly dark period in her life: her father, a famous artist, has recently died, and on the heels of his death she's dumped by her boyfriend James. Looking to recuperate, Catherine heads out to her best friend Virginia's lake house for some much needed relaxation. However, once Catherine arrives relaxation proves impossible to find, as she is overcome with memories of time spent at the same house with James the year before. As Catherine reaches out to Virginia with attempts at connection, Virginia begins spending increasing amounts of time with a local love interest, Rich, and fissures in the relationship between the two women begin to appear, sending Catherine into a downward spiral of delusion and madness.
A bracing, claustrophobic psychological drama and a thrilling examination of a deeply complex relationship between two women whose bonds of friendship are fraying.
"I thought it would be great to make a woman’s movie, where they’re front and center and it’s their issues we’re dealing with, while the men are just incidental doofuses who just hang around the margins and have nothing to do other than antagonize the women. On Listen Up Philip, I didn’t want the women to act as functionaries for the men’s journey but in this film that is what the men are. In talking about Philip for so long I started realizing things about it, and wondered if I could make a movie that doesn’t deal with any of these issues of being a young man and how great would it be to make a movie where the first question I’m asked isn’t, ‘Is the main character based on you?’" (Alex Ross Perry)
Alex Ross Perry
Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 1984. He attended the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He embarked on his cinematic career with a low-budget feature, Impolex (2009), made for only USD 15,000. Listen Up Philip (2014) earned him Special Jury Prize at the Locarno FF.
filmography
2009 Impolex
2011 The Color Wheel
2013 The Sixth Year (segment)
2014 Listen Up Philip
2015 Queen of Earth