{"id":140452,"date":"2026-02-20T21:35:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T21:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/140452\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T21:35:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T21:35:11","slug":"queen-at-sea-review-juliette-binoche-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/140452\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Queen at Sea’ Review: Juliette Binoche drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much like \u201cAmour,\u201d \u201cQueen at Sea\u201d presents an unflinching look at the indignities of eldercare, made more unsettling by the sense that this may be the subject\u2019s sunniest possible spin.<\/p>\n

For his first film in nearly two decades, director Lance Hammer (\u201cBallast\u201d) paints a bleak \u2014 if deeply authentic \u2014 portrait of familial love, devotion, commitment and sacrifice, all of which prove no match for the ravages of age. Moving precisely because of its lack of sentimentality, \u201cQueen at Sea\u201d seems poised to linger long after its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.<\/p>\n

Given such subject matter, the prominence of an intimacy coordinator in the credits may come as a surprise \u2014 but more than anything, \u201cQueen at Sea\u201d is all about intimate coordination, from teenagers plotting a few stolen moments away from prying eyes to the ways illness enters a marital bed, reshaping the bond between two long-partnered adults.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Let\u2019s start with those adults. Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall) and Martin (Tom Courtenay) met later in life, both of them already widowed, and soon fell into the kind of all-consuming relationship known to those with little time to lose. Over 18 years, they built a shared life in a well-appointed North London flat \u2014 and in each other\u2019s arms, which is exactly where their daughter Amanda (Juliette Binoche) finds them during a visit.<\/p>\n

No child, at any age, wants to stumble upon such a sight \u2014 least of all when a parent is in the grip of late-stage dementia, medically incapable of offering consent. Amanda goes ballistic, her reaction sharpened by the sense that this is hardly the first such episode. In a fit of pique, she calls the police, if only to underscore the gravity of this new marital reality with the weight of institutional authority. Doing so only hastens Pandora\u2019s box \u2014 thrusting an already heart-wrenching situation into a legal framework ill-equipped for the deeper injustices of decline.<\/p>\n

In the eyes of the law, Martin has committed sexual assault; in his own estimation, this doting spouse has only adhered to his unsought role as full-time caregiver, responding to his wife\u2019s no-longer-verbal prompts for physical comfort \u2013 and a sexual proclivity hastened by disease that removes all\u00a0 inhibitions. That both contradictory positions hold equal weight only speaks to the filmmaker\u2019s deft and nimble command of his subject. Nothing but disease is ultimately at fault in this hellish slog of good intentions, but such moral relativism offers cold comfort to those dealing with these questions as lived experience.<\/p>\n

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But \u201cQueen at Sea\u201d doesn\u2019t only look to the aged. The film gives equal space to Amanda\u2019s daughter, Sara (Florence Hunt, \u201cBridgerton\u201d), whose comparatively untroubled side-plot casts the wider construction into starker relief. We pick up in media res, not too long after Amanda\u2019s marriage imploded, pushing her (unseen) co-parent to accept a gig abroad while she yanks her adolescent daughter along for a one-year-sabbatical in London. There \u2014 still privately wishing her parents back together and her prior life restored \u2014 Sara flirts and fumbles into maturity, just as her grandmother recedes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Indeed, adolescence and senescence are twin points of no return, periods of bodily upheaval that leave former selves behind. The film embeds with those navigating that flux, from a young girl accepting that her family will not be restored to a man recognizing that woman he married has, in crucial respects, already vanished.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Visually, Hammer pushes against this emotional disorder with a rigid, geometric style. He often frames his characters from a distance and at sharp angles, like someone quietly observing a tense family scene from across the room. Doors, archways and hallways split the image in two, as if the house itself \u2014 much like the legal system \u2014 is trying to impose order on something far more volatile than it can contain.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Binoche and Courtenay bring the same logic to their performances, each playing tightly-wound intellectuals grasping for control. They face one another with an antagonism born of concern, devoid of animosity and marked by a shared self-interest.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Both daughter and husband believe they\u2019re acting for Leslie\u2019s good \u2014 but their solutions are shaped as much by their own need and fears. Both are also driven by an angst brought to life by actors unafraid of frailty and prickly contradiction. For her part, Anna Calder-Marshall is all the more fearless in a mostly non-verbal role, allowing the faint traces of Leslie\u2019s former-self to flicker from behind her eyes, only exacerbating her relatives\u2019 pain with a reminder of all that\u2019s lost.\u00a0<\/p>\n

An ensemble film in every sense, \u201cQueen at Sea\u201d finds a kind of grace in balance, offsetting the harsh realities of growing old with thrills of growing up. Its formal and performative elements work in similar lockstep, with the film never once becoming a showcase for any one voice. Such compassion and care can hardly spare this family from heartbreak, but it certainly makes for powerful cinema.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Tilda\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Much like \u201cAmour,\u201d \u201cQueen at Sea\u201d presents an unflinching look at the indignities of eldercare, made more unsettling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[56891,56894,35666,9,24,63,56968,122,124,123,56969],"class_list":["post-140452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-berlin-film-festival","tag-juliette-binoche","tag-movie-review","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queen-at-sea","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-tom-courtenay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140452","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=140452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}