Mark Reviews Movies: QUEEN OF GLORY

Queen of Glory, Film Movement

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 14, 2022

First-time director Nana Mensah's Queen of Glory is a small but efficient film. It touches upon some significant topics, but Mensah's screenplay does so with a strong focus on its main character, as well as the various relationships she tries to maintain or discovers over the course of this story. In a sturdily sympathetic performance, Mensah also stars here as that central character, a scientist whose life in New York City seems to be in order, only for a sudden and unexpected death to upend all of it.

The filmmaker/star's Sarah Obeng seems to have everything she could want or need: a good job that's potentially going to do some real good at a prestigious university, an apartment that will at least do for now, and a romance with co-worker Lyle (Adam Leon) that seems to be moving toward the next steps. The downside, as we quickly learn, is that Lyle is married, has two kids, and is about to move to Ohio for a new job.

Sarah is under the impression that she'll be moving there with him and with him leaving his family for her. After one of the couple's secret get-togethers at her apartment, Sarah gets a call that her mother has died from an aneurysm.

This is personally devastating, of course, but it also throws all of Sarah's best-laid plans into upheaval. She has to deal with the funeral arrangements, complicated by the traditions of the family's cultural roots in Ghana and the number of people—family and friends—who want the mother to have a proper farewell. Mensah intercuts some scenes of her trying—and often failing—to uphold those customs with archival footage of people from the West African country continuing those traditions through the decades, as well as with a sense of purpose and ease that Sarah can barely imagine. A trip to the butcher for a customary meal almost makes her vomit, for example.

She also has to figure out what to do with her mother's house and life's work, a Christian bookstore—not to mention Pitt (Meeko Gattuso), the store's only and loyal employee (Sarah's mother gave him, an ex-convict, a second chance when no one else would). Then, there's the arrival of Sarah's father Godwin (Oberon K.A. Adjepong), who has been living in Ghana since the time Sarah's parents divorced. Father and daughter's relationship is, obviously, more than a bit strained after all of that.

Mensah's film simply lives with her character, through the struggles to please everyone and to keep her own life functioning as she thinks it should. The filmmaker presents all of this with a sense of good humor, an understanding of Sarah trying to fend off grief and to connect to her heritage, and a real affection for these new friends (including the mother's neighbors, a family of Russian immigrants) and the tenuous bonds of family. Queen of Glory is a short but sweet and thoughtfully considered film.

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