Queen at Sea

It’s rare that formidable French actress Juliette Binoche is fighting to match her two co-stars. But, so it is in American writer-director Lance Hammer’s (Ballast) London-set, moral maze of a dementia drama.

Anna Calder-Marshall is Leslie, a woman with advanced dementia, and Tom Courtenay is Martin, her doting husband. Both embody their roles with subatomic nuance to drum up not just their present relationship, but a history that, like the rings on a mighty tree stump, has brought them to this moment. 

In one of the year’s boldest openings, Hammer drops us in at the deep end. Amanda (Binoche) and her teenage daughter Sara (Florence Hunt) pop into this elderly couple’s sanctuary to find Martin having sex with Leslie. Amanda calls the police, believing that her mother lacks the capacity to give consent to her stepfather. Given the chance to avoid this outcome in exchange for a promise that he won’t do this again, Martin gently seethes: ‘You’ve no right to ask us this.’

This scene launches dilemmas that will unspool for the rest of the runtime. It’s a credit to Hammer that he seeks to explore rather than to answer them. Is Martin abusing Leslie or does she initiate their intimacy as a remaining source of marital comfort? Is that a moot point when she is almost non-verbal and her illness has erased her sexual inhibitions?

As these questions are introduced, so are the mechanisms of humane state care. The police arrive, instigating an upsetting medical check-up, a visit from a social worker, and the suggestion of moving Leslie to an assisted living facility. Meanwhile, the consequences extend through the generations. Divorcée Amanda and Sara have abandoned their home in Newcastle and moved into a freshly rented high-rise apartment to be there in Leslie’s hour of need.

There are no easy answers in this raw but empathetic film

Additional questions grow out of the initial consent drama, creating a hydra of domestic anguish. Will the care system suit Leslie better than her home? And what of the sacrifices that home care will ask of Martin, Amanda and Sara? Hammer’s careful, intimate characterisation lands these questions as emotional blows rather than ‘issues’. Amanda and Martin are often in opposition but they have one thing in common: they love Leslie. Their animosity is softened as the film paints in empathy for the confusion that can tear families apart. 

A peripheral source of relief comes courtesy of the London setting. The Northern line – and Highgate station, in particular – gets its flowers. Hammer presents generational mirror images as teenager Sara starts her journey to worldly self-discovery at the same time as her grandmother is leaving it all behind.

Binoche brings warmth to Amanda, the anointed disciplinarian in the situation, while veteran British actor Courtenay is transfixing as a man who carries competing worlds inside of him. Denied the tools of language, Calder-Marshall embodies Leslie with real physical mastery that adds an extra sliver of authenticity. Social realism builds to a shocking third act, posing a final question: can the deeply human urge to see your waning loved one as they used to be, rather than as they are now, pose a danger past a certain point in this brutal illness? There are no easy answers in this raw but deeply empathetic film.  

Queen of Sea premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.