‘Queen At Sea’ review: Juliette Binoche, Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall stun in fearless dementia drama

Dir. Lance Hammer. UK/USA. 2026. 121mins

Written and directed by US filmmaker Lance Hammer – his first feature since 2008’s acclaimed Mississippi Delta drama Ballast – this sparely executed London-set film centres on an elderly couple affected by the woman’s dementia. More than holding its own alongside other prominent dramas about the ravages of age – Michael Haneke’s Amour, Gaspar Noé’s Vortex – Queen at Sea tackles its themes fearlessly, thanks to rigorous execution and a quartet of superb performances.

A subtle, non-judgmental, rigorously unsentimental drama

The presence of Juliette Binoche will give this challenging title some commercial leverage following its bow in Berlin competition – but it is the veteran duo of Anna Calder-Marshall and Tom Courtenay who do most to carry the film’s emotional complexity.

Binoche plays Amanda, an academic who has temporarily moved from Newcastle to North London to be near her mother Leslie (Calder-Marshall), a visual artist in the advanced stages of dementia. The film begins with Amanda walking into her mother’s house to find Leslie in bed with her second husband and permanent caregiver Martin (Tom Courtenay). Martin has already been warned he cannot have sex with Leslie, as she is unable to express consent – and Amanda calls the police. As an investigation begins, she realises she has triggered a process that is going faster and further than she expected – with Martin arrested and the possibility looming that the couple may be separated.

Along with a hard core of social realist investigation, the film opens up a nexus of philosophical, psychological and emotional issues: the repercussions when a person is no longer mentally capable of informed consent; the question of Martin’s understanding of what his wife wants and needs; the parameters of a person’s responsibilities in the guardianship of an elderly parent.

Hammer pursues the narrative with compassionate detachment, showing how Leslie’s condition affects the older couple as well as Amanda, who must now reconsider her future and that of her teenage daughter Sara (Florence Hunt, a regular Bridgerton cast member and 2024 Screen Star Of Tomorrow). In a subtly threaded strand throughout, Hammer makes us aware of what Sara is experiencing as she explores her independence from her family. In particular, she is discovering new intimacy with James, (Cody Molko) a boy from school; the interplay between Hunt and Molko comes across with breezy, improv-style naturalness, offsetting the overall austerity.

Ostensibly the film’s lead, Binoche gives a finely judged, generous performance, discreetly holding back from centre stage, while Calder-Marshall and Courtenay work together beautifully as two people who can no longer communicate as they once did, yet need each other’s emotional connection in a way that is beyond words. Stage, film and TV veteran Calder-Marshall barely speaks, but Leslie’s expressions – gentle, baffled, sometimes furious – signify everything. Embracing the physical and mental indignities that dementia imposes, Calder-Marshall is fearless in a way that more than measures up to the performances by Françoise Lebrun and Emmanuelle Riva in the Noé and Haneke films. Courtenay is again in superb form, 11 years after his Best Actor award in Berlin in 45 Years; here, he shuttles compellingly between tenderness and rage, resilience and vulnerability – working together with Calder-Marshall to riveting and poignant effect.

This is a subtle, non-judgmental, rigorously unsentimental drama. The only instance in which Hammer’s risk-taking seems questionable is the film’s climactic incident – an altogether plausible one, but a shock for the viewer in a film that arguably doesn’t require shocks as such. Yet Hammer, editing the film himself, concludes on a brief, even staccato shot that suggests that, cruel as the cycle of life is, it always rolls on towards new hope.

Photographed on 35mm by Adolpho Veloso (who also shot Train Dreams) Queen at Sea makes superb use of the everyday environs of North London suburbia, with keen focus on the area’s brutalist architecture. The photography musters a claustrophobic feel inside and out, with expressionistic angles on the corridors and staircases of Leslie and Martin’s house. A well-curated classical soundtrack (Brahms, Schubert, Gavin Bryars et al.) evocatively maps out the older couple’s cultural and emotional universe – with splashes of Lola Young’s irreverent pop for Sara’s world.