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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the Berlin Film Festival 2026. Greenwich Entertainment releases “Queen at Sea” in theaters beginning Friday, October 30.
Lance Hammer was the toast of the town in 2008 with his gritty, Mississippi-set coming-of-age drama, “Ballast.” The Dardennes-esque vérité portrait of a life that cares about loss and economic hardship won two awards at this year’s Sundance Film Festival – including Best Director for Hammer – and received several Film Independent Spirit and Gotham award nominations.
And then, poof: a hammer was never heard again.
Now he’s back, almost two decades later, with a deeply confusing yet compassionate moral drama about a group in the midst of dementia, titled “Queen at Sea.” She portrays Juliette Binoche as a woman who is desperate and panicked to take care of her sick mother, Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall, completely breaking down in her specificity towards the toll of the illness), who is slipping deeper into the illness. Leslie’s grip on time, memory, and action is disappearing in the multi-story London flat she shares with her husband of 19 years, Martin (a brutal Tom Courtenay). At the same time, Amanda (Binoche), an academic on vacation, is going through a separation herself – from her husband in Newcastle, and now she has to bring her daughter, Sara (Florence Hunt), back to London to see her mother.
But when Amanda catches her father, Martin, in a compromising situation with Leslie, another separation moves, with Leslie to be lost in an elder care system that is scary and scary for the patient, and a kind of emotional death sentence for herself and her loved ones.
As someone who has watched the loss of Alzheimer’s disease up close, I found “Queen at Sea” to be particularly brutal, even despite some of its plot notes. The feelings are there, even if the story is, well, lost at sea at times. The geographical situation around Amanda, having left her husband (and Sara’s father) in Newcastle, is confusing. Meanwhile, Sara has quickly restarted her life in Newcastle with new friends and a potential new flame, while writer/director Hammer draws a parallel in the edit between Sara’s warm relationship with a classmate, and Leslie’s mental decline and separation from her own partner.
When the movie starts, Amanda has made a house call to check on Leslie, and she walks in on Martin trying to have sex with Leslie with eyes other than the bed. This is not the first time this has happened, and it is an event that Amanda has urged Martin to cancel. But the Viagra in his medicine cabinet suggests otherwise, that he keeps going back for more, that Amanda still wants him to stop.
Dementia dramas like Sarah Polley’s wounding “Away from Her” (where Julie Christie’s husband, Grant Anderson, basically puts her up in a nursing home to combat his own infidelity) and Michael Haneke’s Oscar-winning “Amour” (the toughest of this fleet of films) tend to focus closely on the relationship between an Alzheimer’s patient and her partner when they are found on the memories of the past.
Hammer’s film introduces deep questions and new issues of consent into the formula – does Leslie agree at some level to have sex with her husband? Is the same pleasure in a permanent life to be denied? Can a person with dementia consent to have sex? Leslie’s instincts are now narrowed down to the primary: food, water, sleep, and, naturally, sex. So where do the remaining emotions go when the body they are now in is just a vessel for a persistent mind?
Martin insists that Leslie – a once celebrated and extremely talented painter now slowly moving, mentally and emotionally and physically – enjoys these encounters. They have been married for 19 years, after all, and when Amanda calls the police and brings authorities into the situation, the couple is suddenly torn apart. Then questions arose as to whether they should continue to separate and whether Leslie should be placed in a home.
That’s what eventually happens, and where Leslie makes an inappropriate connection with another patient to fill Martin’s void. Writer/director Hammer, however, minimizes the melodrama inherent in this setting, even during shooting sequences, whether in Martin and Leslie’s apartment or in various hospitals, with bracing handheld close-ups. (The Adolpho Veloso cinema, meanwhile, bathes London in vanished daylight.) Far from being harsh, the rape-device inspection forced upon Leslie is harrowing and sad, especially since she doesn’t know what’s going on and why a speculum is being inserted into her. What a world Martin could have forced his wife?
Binoche, who has been giving passionate and emotionally controlled performances for years, including films with Haneke, gives one of her most unsettling and emotional performances at this point in her career in “Queen at Sea.” An emotional phone call to her future husband lays bare her vulnerability as she dials the last person she’d rather not call, but the one she has to anyway. There may be a lack of inner life outside of those conditioned by this condition, but Leslie’s life is not. Amanda’s mother seems to get involved when she gets the chance to paint at a nursing home, an aseptic and horrible place for which everyone in the family seems to be hearing strangely.
The famous British actor Courtenay, recently remembered in the wedding picture with a memory problem “45 Years” opposite Charlotte Rampling, is very devastating as a husband scrambling for answers and to legitimize his own place in Leslie’s life. The only element that doesn’t quite land, and that seems literally cut into the film, is Florence Hunt as Amanda’s daughter. Hammer seems to be trying to point out that she may be headed for her own mental ruin in the future by interspersing 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 version.
In the end, however, anyone who has suffered what Amanda, or Leslie, or Martin does in this film will find something to relate to and feel towards. Hammer doesn’t avoid hard facts and he doesn’t offer pat feelings about how these people are going to end up and what depression does to them in the end. Let’s say there is hope in scarcity. But the actors help carry Hammer’s message – and make it unforgettable.
Grade: B+
“Queen at Sea” premiered at the Berlin Film Festival 2026. Greenwich Entertainment opens the film beginning Friday, October 30.
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