Greenwich Entertainment
Queen at Sea may be as steely as the wintry London skies hanging over its small cast of characters, but despite its bleak subject matter, the film stands head and shoulders above as one of the year’s most cerebrally compelling family dramas. Lance Hammer’s first filmmaking effort since Ballast almost twenty years ago, Queen at Sea tightly revolves around a family, specifically three generations of its women, as they face distinctive crossroads in their lives, all set in motion when their oldest matriarch is diagnosed with dementia. The film explores the often unseen grey areas of domestic life with precision that is both fascinating and gut-wrenching at every turn.
Queen at Sea divides its attention between a handful of characters, two of whom are Martin (British acting royalty Tom Courtenay) and Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), an elderly couple whose day-to-day rhythms are distinguished by shared love for classical music, long walks, and a regular sex life, the latter of which deeply disturbs Leslie’s daughter Amanda (Juliette Binoche), since Leslie suffers from advanced dementia. While Hammer’s elegant screenplay wastes no time in overcontextualizing this conflict, it is evidently an ongoing issue within their family, prompting Amanda to involve the police and social services. Although Amanda clearly sees Martin as a loving husband to her mother, she does not believe Leslie is capable of giving sexual consent to Martin: “She’s unreadable. I’m not sure if she recognized me.”
Amanda’s predicament soon consumes the film as quickly as it does her own life, leaving little attention for her teenage daughter Sara (Florence Hunt), whose world is opening up just as her older kin seem to be reaching an end. As the narrow corridors of her mother’s Victorian home threaten to close in upon Amanda, she becomes engulfed in the nuances of consent, aging, and connection that Queen at Sea confronts with such an icy sophisication.
Greenwich Entertainment
Hammer balances the emotional anguish of Queen at Sea’s characters with a rigorous filmmaking approach that often leans into subjective distance rather than Hollywood-style sentimentality, allowing the audience to experience each distinctive figure and their quandaries with ambiguity instead of fully understanding their complicated perspectives. Shot by Adolpho Veloso, who adopts a totally different feeling than his Oscar-nominated work on last year’s Train Dreams, the movie’s visual language emphasizes the sharp contours of the brutalist apartment blocks where Sara hangs out with her romantic interest, or the treacherously steep staircases that connect Leslie’s shared home with Martin, spaces which often echo the movie’s most solemn tones.
The movie’s focused filmmaking keeps the actors’ performances at the forefront of its grounded drama. Hammer and his team mandated an extensive rehearsal period for the central characters, creating a collaborative process that let the actors workshop their dialogue and make it as naturalistic as possible, a methodology that pays off tenfold as the movie patiently moves through its two-hour runtime. With a troop of actors heavily experienced in theater, Queen at Sea places much faith in their ability to build convincing personalities, which they collectively do with careful dignity.
Frayed and frazzled in ways we have not seen since her commanding presence in 2022’s Both Sides of the Blade, Binoche embodies Amanda with deep perturbation reflective of her headspace, plagued by indecision over her mother’s safest future, incapable of focusing on anything else, her career as a writer, her daughter, or otherwise. Amanda’s deep unease is sharply contrasted with the seeming placidity of Leslie and Martin’s quiet, co-dependent life together, which her interference wholly unravels. As the married couple in jeopardy, Courtenay and Calder-Marshall create a touching onscreen chemistry that is nearly non-verbal, communicated through minute glances and physical gestures that convey the closeness of their bond, despite the disease that has altered it so greatly. While the morality behind their sexual interactions can be clearly contested, the love they share and the threats it faces make for the movie’s most devastating facets. From The Father to Still Alice, we have seen actors embody dementia sufferers with great success, but Calder-Marshall’s turn as Leslie feels even more haunting than these award-winning works. Scant dialogue aside, you are prompted to try and understand her character’s emotions through the look in her eyes and the masterful intensity of her body language in every scene, yielding a hypnotic portrayal rarely captured with such openness. Notably, Courtenay and Calder-Marshall shared the Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance at the Berlinale, where the film world premiered earlier this year.
Greenwich Entertainment
Regardless the hard truths it faces, largely rooted in time’s inevitable passage, Queen at Sea’s authenticity to family life’s adversities culminates in an unflinchingly sincere film. Hammer’s first work in nearly two decades might be a tough sit for many audiences, but it is incredibly rewarding for the unexplored territories it endeavors to portray, intricate perspectives rarely captured cinematically. Although its stringently arthouse sensibilities never aim for didacticism, Queen at Sea’s subleties offer fresh visions of familial responsibility that feel applicable and rather relatable to many walks of life in the contemporary world.
4.5/5
‘Queen at Sea’ world premiered at the 2026 Berlinale, where it was awarded both the Silver Bear for Best Director and Best Supporting Performance. The movie’s nationwide theatrical release begins on Friday, November 6, courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment. Click here to find ‘Queen at Sea’ Showtimes near you.