Lance Hammer was the toast of the town in 2008 with his hard-hitting, Mississippi-set coming-of-age drama “Ballast.” The Dardennes-esque vérité portrait of lives careening from loss and economic hardship won two awards at the Sundance Film Festival that year — including Best Director for Hammer — and received multiple Film Independent Spirit and Gotham award nominations.
And then, poof: Hammer was never heard from again.
He has now returned, almost two decades later, with an extremely upsetting but compassionate moral drama about agency amid dementia, titled “Queen at Sea.” It stars Juliette Binoche as a woman desperate and panicked to take care of her ailing mother, Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall, absolutely shattering in her specificity toward the sickness’ toll), who is slipping deeper into the illness. Leslie’s grasp of time, memory, and function is vanishing in the multi-story London flat she shares with her husband of 19 years, Martin (a brutally heartbreaking Tom Courtenay). Meanwhile, Amanda (Binoche), an academic on sabbatical, is going through a separation herself — from her husband in Newcastle, and now she’s forced to bring her daughter, Sara (Florence Hunt), with her back to London to check in on her mother.
But when Amanda catches her stepfather, Martin, in a compromising position with Leslie, another separation sets into motion, with Leslie potentially about to be lost in an elder-care system that’s frightening and scary for the patient, and a kind of emotional death sentence for her and her loved ones.
As someone who’s watched a close loved one lose themselves to Alzheimer’s disease, I found “Queen at Sea” to be especially bruising, even despite some of its patchier plot notes. The emotions are there, even if the story is, well, lost at sea at times. The geographical configuration surrounding Amanda, having left behind a husband (and Sara’s father) in Newcastle, is confusing. Meanwhile, Sara has very quickly restarted her life in Newcastle with new friends and a potential new flame, as writer/director Hammer draws parallel comparisons in the edit between Sara’s blooming relationship with a classmate, and Leslie’s mental deterioration and estrangement from her own partner.
When the movie begins, Amanda is on a house call to check on Leslie, and walks in on Martin attempting to have sex with a dazed-out, addled-eyed Leslie prostrate on the bed. This is not the first time this has happened, and it’s an occurrence Amanda has implored Martin to knock off. But the Viagra in his medicine cabinet suggests otherwise, that he keeps going back for more, that Amanda keeps asking him to stop.
Dementia dramas like Sarah Polley’s wounding “Away from Her” (wherein Julie Christie’s husband Grant Anderson basically sets her up in a nursing home to counteract his own infidelities) and Michael Haneke’s Oscar-winning “Amour” (the harshest of this fleet of films) tend to center close-up on the relations between an Alzheimer’s patient and her partner, and how these relationships break down when there are fewer past and present memories to found them on.
Hammer’s film introduces profound new questions and issues about consent into the formula — is Leslie agreeing on some level to have sex with her husband? Is the only pleasure in her winnowing life to be denied? Can a person with dementia consent to having sex? Leslie’s instincts now are narrowed to the primal: food, water, sleep, and, naturally, sex. So where do all these leftover feelings go when the body containing them is now only a vessel for a going mind?
‘Queen at Sea’Seafaring
Martin insists that Leslie — a once-celebrated and very talented painter now slowly going mute, mentally and emotionally and physically — is enjoying these encounters. They’ve been married for 19 years, after all, and when Amanda calls the police and introduces authorities into the situation, the couple is suddenly torn asunder. Then arise questions about whether they should continue to be separated and whether to place Leslie in a home.
Which is eventually what happens, and where Leslie forms an inappropriate bond with another patient to fill the Martin void. Writer/director Hammer, though, downplays the melodrama inherent to this scenario, even while shooting sequences, whether in Martin and Leslie’s apartment or in various hospitals, with a bracing handheld intimacy. (Cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, meanwhile, bathes London in a beautifully faded daylight.) Far from sterilely composed, a rape kit examination forced upon Leslie is harrowing and demeaning, especially as she has no idea what’s going on and no clue why a speculum is being inserted into her. In what world could Martin have raped his wife?
Binoche, who has been giving committed and emotionally controlled performances for years lately, including in films by Haneke, gives one of her most unsentimental and gripping performances at this stage in her career in “Queen at Sea.” An emotional phone call to her soon-to-be ex-husband lays bare to blanched vulnerability as she dials the last person she would prefer not to call, but the one she is forced to anyway. Interior lives outside those determined by this situation may be lacking, but Leslie’s isn’t. Amanda’s mother seems to activate when given the chance to paint at a nursing home, an aseptic and terrible place for which everyone in the family seems to be awkwardly auditioning.
The great British actor Courtenay, most recently memorable in the similarly memory-impaired marriage portrait “45 Years” opposite Charlotte Rampling, is quite devastating as a husband scrambling for answers and to legitimize his own place in Leslie’s life. The one element that doesn’t quite land, and seems quite literally chopped into the film, is Florence Hunt as Amanda’s daughter. Hammer seems to be trying to signal that she may be headed for her own future mental ruin by intercutting her first romance with scenes of Martin and Leslie’s last. It’s a noble idea, but it ends up feeling like scraps from an earlier draft.
Ultimately, though, anyone who’s endured what Amanda, or Leslie, or Martin do in this movie will find something to relate to and feel toward. Hammer spares no hard truths and offers no pat feelings with regard to how these people are bound to end up and what dementia ultimately does to them. Let’s just say hope is at a shortage. But the actors help carry Hammer’s message — and make it unforgettable.
Grade: B+
“Queen at Sea” premiered at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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