Whilst the title is some indication of what we are going to experience, it’s fair to say that The Ego Death of Queen Cecilia can’t easily be summed up via its title alone, much less guessed at. This is a superb piece of indie cinema storytelling, a deeply personal character study, but one which draws on a wealth of modern obsessions, affordances and dilemmas to weave a highly effective story.
We start with a sunny day in suburban Texas: Cecilia (Jo Schaeffer), currently without her crown, works as a delivery driver. She’s also a delivery driver pulling a scam: she decides to place a Louis Vuitton package on the front doorstep, photograph it as if to prove it’s been left safely, then picks it up again, taking it with her. This kind of appearance vs. reality motif continues throughout the film. Later, in a parking lot with her spoils, she notices someone she remembers from high school. Clearly, she takes more than a passing interest in this guy, filming him as he transfers a heavy bag from one vehicle to another. Okay; that done, she resumes interest in the very expensive Vuitton shoes she’s just stolen. A gift for a hardworking, broke delivery driver?
Not quite. The shoes next appear as a giveaway on Cecilia’s ailing online channel; it’s other people’s validation she wants. The shoes don’t even fit her. Eager for likes and comments, she also has something else in mind: a big overhaul for the Queen Cecilia brand, a brand which, on first pass, couldn’t look more different to Cecilia’s daily reality. The shoes are all part of a snare to secure a new agent, one promising super-stardom once more. Ten years previously, Queen Cecilia was hot stuff, but as with many of these online brands, her star has fallen; it’s fallen so far, she has had to resort to stealing on the job. Doing such stupid things does, at least, rid her of that marked contrast between online appearance and lived reality; it turns out that the delivery company might have noticed the very shoes recently reported as undelivered have turned up on her channel, alongside a few other stolen packages, too.
Being called out on her behaviour, as well as getting fired, precipitates a change in Cecilia. That passing interest she showed in the guy from the parking lot resurfaces one more; it seems they have some low-level bad blood between them from years past, and somehow, his freshness in her mind perhaps, he becomes the new focus for her frustration – as well as part of her new scheme to get rich quickly – and illegally.
This turns out to be a bad idea, but not for the straightforward reasons you might anticipate.
Wow, this film feels very timely. People have been struggling to make ends meet for forever, but only recently has the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame been so inveigled in all of this by the new possibilities of the internet. Whilst our new, negotiated relationships with online selves have been forming the bedrock of horror and sci-fi films for several years now, The Ego Death of Queen Cecilia is neither a horror film nor a sci-fi, so its own exploration of this theme is much more low key and plausible. Artifice – real, recognisable kinds of artifice – run through and through the film, underpinning every crazy decision and bad call which occur. Cecilia is in love with the version of herself which once allowed her to make her living as an influencer, and she cannot accept the change. In pursuit of what she wants, she scripts and plans phonecalls; she lies about her age; she covers up her (perfectly fine) hair with a glossy wig for the camera. Everything about her has an undercurrent of untruth, talking authenticity but now, in the pursuit of that version of authenticity, totally full of it. You cannot always like the protagonist, and at times you may feel incensed by her behaviour, but it all feels very real indeed. Cecilia is flawed but human, often clearly holding back her anger to continue to present her hard-won persona, and it’s a clever, sensitive performance from Schaeffer in her first ever acting role, carrying the bulk of the screen time with only modest amounts of lines to speak. She’s a petite actor, too, and this further emphasises her fragility when she’s shown up against some imposing, and dangerous figures – men who don’t much care for her aspirations.
The story unfolds not via the rather hackneyed use of numbered chapters (yay) but through a moving timeline, shifting back in five or ten year intervals at first before closing the gap between past and present, trusting the audience to get what’s going on (yay). It’s very creatively shot and snappily edited too, showing skill. Aerial shots make the characters look like chess pieces in play, and so it often feels during the film – with Cecilia’s old game plan unable to adapt, even as she cruises towards a loss. It’s hard, isn’t it? Changing the game?
This is a really gritty, involving film: The Ego Death of Queen Cecilia is all about desperation, framed in age-old and in relatively new ways. Sharp and economical, it’s also one of those rare birds where one person (Chris Beier) wrote, filmed, scored, edited and produced it, but it hasn’t led to flaws in the finished film as a result, something which can and often does happen where one person cannot bear to lose beloved footage for example, or to recast certain ideas for the benefit of the film as a whole. Here, Beier’s work has resulted in an emphatic positive, with a clearly realised and handled piece of cinema.