{"id":136398,"date":"2026-02-17T18:42:27","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T18:42:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/136398\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T18:42:27","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T18:42:27","slug":"juliette-binoche-in-a-strong-dementia-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/136398\/","title":{"rendered":"Juliette Binoche in a Strong Dementia Drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lance Hammer was the toast of the town in 2008 with his hard-hitting, Mississippi-set coming-of-age drama \u201cBallast<\/a>.\u201d The Dardennes-esque v\u00e9rit\u00e9 portrait of lives careening from loss and economic hardship won two awards at the Sundance Film<\/a> Festival that year \u2014 including Best Director for Hammer \u2014 and received multiple Film Independent Spirit and Gotham award nominations. <\/p>\n

And then, poof: Hammer was never heard from again.<\/p>\n

He has now returned, almost two decades later, with an extremely upsetting but compassionate moral drama about agency amid dementia, titled \u201cQueen at Sea<\/a>.\u201d It stars Juliette Binoche<\/a> 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\u2019 toll), who is slipping deeper into the illness. Leslie\u2019s 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 \u2014 from her husband in Newcastle, and now she\u2019s forced to bring her daughter, Sara (Florence Hunt), with her back to London to check in on her mother.<\/p>\n

\"Olivia<\/a> \"The<\/a> <\/p>\n

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\u2019s frightening and scary for the patient, and a kind of emotional death sentence for her and her loved ones.<\/p>\n

As someone who\u2019s watched a close loved one lose themselves to Alzheimer\u2019s disease, I found \u201cQueen at Sea\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s blooming relationship with a classmate, and Leslie\u2019s mental deterioration and estrangement from her own partner.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Dementia dramas like Sarah Polley\u2019s wounding \u201cAway from Her\u201d<\/a> (wherein Julie Christie\u2019s husband Grant Anderson basically sets her up in a nursing home to counteract his own infidelities) and Michael Haneke\u2019s Oscar-winning \u201cAmour\u201d (the harshest of this fleet of films) tend to center close-up on the relations between an Alzheimer\u2019s patient and her partner, and how these relationships break down when there are fewer past and present memories to found them on. <\/p>\n

Hammer\u2019s film introduces profound new questions and issues about consent into the formula \u2014 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\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

\"Queen\u2018Queen at Sea\u2019Seafaring<\/p>\n

Martin insists that Leslie \u2014 a once-celebrated and very talented painter now slowly going mute, mentally and emotionally and physically \u2014 is enjoying these encounters. They\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s going on and no clue why a speculum is being inserted into her. In what world could Martin have raped his wife?<\/p>\n

Binoche, who has been giving committed and emotionally controlled performances for years lately, including in films by Haneke<\/a>, gives one of her most unsentimental and gripping performances at this stage in her career in \u201cQueen at Sea.\u201d 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\u2019s isn\u2019t. Amanda\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The great British actor Courtenay, most recently memorable in the similarly memory-impaired marriage portrait \u201c45 Years\u201d opposite Charlotte Rampling, is quite devastating as a husband scrambling for answers and to legitimize his own place in Leslie\u2019s life. The one element that doesn\u2019t quite land, and seems quite literally chopped into the film, is Florence Hunt as Amanda\u2019s 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\u2019s last. It\u2019s a noble idea, but it ends up feeling like scraps from an earlier draft.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, though, anyone who\u2019s 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\u2019s just say hope is at a shortage. But the actors help carry Hammer\u2019s message \u2014 and make it unforgettable.<\/p>\n

Grade: B+<\/p>\n

\u201cQueen at Sea\u201d premiered at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival<\/a>. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lance Hammer was the toast of the town in 2008 with his hard-hitting, Mississippi-set coming-of-age drama \u201cBallast.\u201d The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136399,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[56891,749,56894,9,24,63,56968,122,124,123,1108],"class_list":{"0":"post-136398","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-berlin-film-festival","9":"tag-film","10":"tag-juliette-binoche","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-nyc","14":"tag-queen-at-sea","15":"tag-queens","16":"tag-queens-headlines","17":"tag-queens-news","18":"tag-reviews"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}