Queens Film Review: Family Drama About Change

Klaudia Reynicke’s Queens (Reinas) is an affecting, thought-provoking family drama set in Lima, Peru, during a time of violence and terror.

By sometimes focusing on the perspective of a teenager and her little sister, it manages to be both entertaining and thought-provoking; deceptively light, and dramatically affecting. Queens should work both with Peruvian audiences who lived through the times it’s recreating and with international spectators who will manage to empathise with its protagonists.

Queens focuses on a middle-class family living in Lima during the Peruvian Internal Conflict of the eighties and early nineties. Even though they are privileged enough, they still have to put up with occasional blackouts, curfews, ridiculous economic inflation, and the constant threat of terrorists belonging to the guerrilla group Shining Path. The context in which they live is so difficult, in fact, that Elena (Jimena Lindo, The Best Families) decides to escape the country and move to the United States with her two daughters, teenager Aurora (Luana Vega) and little girl Lucía (Abril Gjurinovic).

Before they can do so, though, they need their visas and, most importantly, an official exit permit signed by their father, Carlos (Gonzalo Molina, Quadrilateral), who divorced Elena some time ago. The problem is, the man is a serial liar, and even though he has returned to Lima after living in the jungle for a while, he doesn’t seem very interested in letting his former family go. That doesn’t stop him from trying to hit it off with her daughters, though, calling them his “queens”, taking them to the beach, and telling them lies about his job, his house, and the reason he has been out of town. But the more time he spends with them, the more he ends up influencing the kids, and the more worried Elena becomes about their future outside Peru.

Even though the context in which Queens takes place is important from a narrative standpoint, it isn’t really the focus of the story. The audience doesn’t need to know a lot about Shining Path, the terrorist attacks in Lima or the way the government reacted to the conflict in order to follow the narrative. The film says enough about those topics for the viewer to know how they relate to the characters, and for most of the plot points to make sense. For example, the military and the police take a small but pivotal role during the movie’s climax, and even though non-Peruvian audiences will not know much about why they act the way they do, their appearance in the story still makes sense.

In the end, the historical and political details are in service of the story, and not the other way round. Queens is more concerned about its characters and their daily lives and interactions than about what happens on a more macro level. And in that sense, it does a good job of making the viewer relate to them, especially the two kids. Even though the country is going through a rough time, as a true teenager, Aurora is more concerned about her interests; her friends, her sorta-boyfriend, the beach she likes to go to, basically all the reasons she wants to stay. And even though Lucía wants to leave, she only wants to do it to be with her mum, not because she’s aware of the sociopolitical problems she’d be escaping. It’s all suitably realistic and relatable.

On the other hand, it’s through Elena’s pain that the viewer does get a sense of the magnitude of her choices. She has managed to get a job in the States and is leaving almost everyone she loves in order to start a new life from scratch. She’s the one who has to do all the paperwork; she’s the one who has to get the Visas. And of course, she’s the one who has to try and convince her ex-husband to sign the permits. She’s aware of the sacrifices she has to make, but she also knows that she has to give her daughters a better future, escaping from what she considers to be a country immersed in violence and death and both economic and social turmoil.

Then, of course, we have Carlos. We only get bits and pieces of what he truly is; most of the time, we see him through the eyes of Elena or the kids. Nevertheless, as one of the supporting characters puts it bluntly, he is a mythomaniac: a charismatic conman, capable of selling anything to anyone. He pretends to be successful and mysterious (even telling his daughters that he’s a secret agent working for the government), when he actually works as both a taxi driver and a security guard, wandering from place to place. We never see his house, any kind of evidence to support any of the great statements he makes, and even though he seems to want to be a part of his daughters’ lives, he still comes and goes as he pleases, disappearing for days at a time.

Despite all that, though, he is played with undeniable charisma by Molina. Carlos is doe-eyed and soft-spoken; it doesn’t take a genius to realise why he manages to con and persuade pretty much anyone – or at least, anyone who doesn’t really know him. He is quite the pathetic figure: someone who can’t stop lying and who prefers to live in a fantasy rather than putting in the effort to be a better person and a better father. On the other hand, Lindo portrays Elena as his polar opposite: a woman who works hard for her daughters and is doing everything in her power to give them a better future. As for the kids, they are quite good. Luana Vega conveys angst and frustration with verisimilitude, and Abril Gjurinovic is suitably sweet and naive as Lucía.

Queens ends up being an affecting and deceptively simple drama. It’s shot well and it effectively recreates a specific time and place, without feeling either too cheap or too ambitious. But most importantly, it uses the context in which it takes place (a difficult time that is still being discussed by Peruvians to this day) to develop an interesting family story, focusing on both the perspective of the kids (who aren’t fully aware of what they are escaping) and of the adults (a responsible, hard-working woman, and an infantile, mythomaniac man). By the time Queens reaches its inevitable ending, one gets the sense that most of the characters end up making the right choices, and that despite the tough times ahead of them, some of them will never be able to meaningfully change.

Queens (Reinas), Switzerland’s official submission for the 2025 Academy Awards, will be released in select US theaters on November 29, 2024.