Critic Reviews

The juiciness of the storyline overflows into a series of rushing strawberry rapids that will carry you away.

It’s a dizzying, life-affirming anthem about how it’s never too late to find your way home in the arms of your lover, even if you may have lost your way.

This is the kind of formative underground movie you could pledge your allegiance to for life, especially if you’re coming across it at a certain age for the very first time.

The film might not be set within the current moment, but Langlois always remains attuned to it, with his story about parasocial fandoms and the pressure they put on artists effortlessly transcending its period setting. You’ll have the songs stuck in your head for weeks, too.

The only way to enjoy Queens of Drama is to surrender to its excesses. Which explains why it works so perfectly as a bold lesbian melodrama best told in pop and punk numbers.

Queens delights in its inspirations, saturates its toxic love story with the markings of an era just now getting its resurgence.

With playful visual flourishes, a willfully garish palette and winks galore (including one to the French feminist writer Monique Wittig), Langlois’s debut has stylistic ambition for days. But it’s not as genre-fluent as “Love Lies Bleeding” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” or as swoon inducing as its volatile couple deserves.

The film did not nail it in many regards, but it is a truly entertaining tribute to queer pop and obsessed fandoms. Queens of Drama is, in the end, a delightful hot mess.

Ultimately, first-timer Langlois is unable to find a discipline within the excess that might keep these Queens on course over feature length. In fairness, his shorts were also over-long, so this won’t be a deterrent to his core crowd.