Lance Hammer's sophomore feature Queen at Sea—his first film in 18 years following the critically acclaimed, but little seen Ballast (2008)—charts the struggles of a middle-aged woman (Juliette Binoche) to find the impossible answers of how best to care for her aging mother (Anna Calder-Marshall) who has late-stage dementia. The mother, Leslie, still lives at home with her husband of 18 years, Martin (Tom Courtenay), who tends to her many needs as best he can, despite his own advanced age and waning physical strength. The film's opening image is of Martin and Leslie slowly making their way up a flight of stairs on one of their daily walks, eventually disappearing out of sight as if they have just been absorbed into the sky. It is one of the few optimistic images in the film, which is otherwise punishingly frank and realistic in its depiction of how dementia steals from everyone in its vicinity—not just from those suffering from the disease, but from all of those who love them (I watched my own father suffer with Alzheimer's for years before his death and am currently helping to care for my father-in-law who has Parkinson's-based dementia, so I definitely have some stake in the subject matter).

And, when Queen at Sea focuses on that brutal reality, it is a deeply moving and powerful drama that treads a thin line between keeping it real and just being depressing. The film's inciting event is Amanda, the Binoche character, and her teenage daughter, Sarah (Florence Hunt), stopping by Martin and Leslie's London townhouse for a visit only to find them upstairs in coitus. It is an immediately traumatizing scene, not because there is anything wrong with geriatric sex, but because the look on Leslie's face suggests that she is unaware of what is happening and why, which gives the act the appearance of sexual assault, which is precisely how Amanda interprets it. Apparently, Martin has previously been asked not to engage in sex with Leslie because she is incapable of giving consent, and this time is the final straw, resulting in Amanda calling the police, which turns the already inflamed familial conflict into a legal morass that eventually involves a rape exam, the involvement of a social worker, and hard questions about whether Leslie can stay in her own home and whether she can be in the presence of her own husband. The stress of each situation is visually emphasized by the manner in which Hammer and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, who recently shot the visually ravishing Train Dreams (2025), frequently isolate the characters at the bottom of the frame, with immense amounts of headroom that suggests a great weight pressing down on them.

Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall, who are 89 and 79 respectively, and were jointly awarded for their performances at the Berlin Film Festival (where the film also nabbed the Jury Prize), are equally and distinctly heartbreaking in their roles: Courtenay channels immense grief and frustration behind his hangdog mug, conveying a sense of weariness that he nevertheless is able to set aside for moments of tenderness with Leslie (some of his profane outbursts, understandable fissures in his armor, are a little less convincing), while Calder-Marshall embodies an almost feral timidity, her eyes often wild with confusion (it is as if everything around her sends her nerve endings into orbit, while at other times she is all but blank). Straddling these two characters, Juliette Binoche has the difficult job of playing a woman who must remain practical and sensible in impossible situations. The law is on her side, but she recognizes that forcing her mother and stepfather apart might not be the right thing to do even it is is the right thing to do, which is precisely the sad, tangled web in which family members find themselves when a loved one is slipping away from them and doesn't even realize it. (Martin insists that he knows Leslie better than Amanda does, to which she responds that no one knows her anymore because she is no longer the same person and is fundamentally incapable of conveying her inner life anymore.)

Unfortunately, there is a major problem in Queen at Sea, which is that Hammer, who both wrote and directed, doesn't keep the focus entirely on the struggles involving Amanda, Martin, and Leslie. Instead, at regular intervals he detours to focus on the profoundly banal and largely uninteresting life of Amanda's teenage daughter, Sarah, and her budding relationship with a tousle-headed schoolmate named James (Cody Molko). They flirt, make lip-synch videos together at the skate park, talk about their families, hang out with friends, and so forth, all of which is perfectly fine in its own mundane way, but has no discernible place in this film. Every time Hammer cuts away from the main drama to focus on Sarah's parallel drama, the film loses its power and incites restlessness. The idea, I suppose, is to find some kind of thematic parallel between age and youth, endings and beginnings, terrible knowledge and blissful ignorance, with sexual awakening being the all-too-obvious tie that binds. If so, it is a muddy connection that only detracts from what is otherwise a powerful portrait of people struggling to do the right thing in a place where right and wrong have no hard edges or clear definitions.

Copyright © 2026 James Kendrick

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