This exquisitely painful, profoundly affecting drama follows a daughter, Amanda (Juliette Binoche), who finds herself increasingly at odds with her stepfather, Martin (Tom Courtenay), over the care of her mother, Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), as he manages the challenges of her worsening dementia and their continued physical relationship. Posing moral and ethical dilemmas commonplace for those later in life yet still endlessly open to interpretation and seldom resolved with any degree of certainty, Lance Hammer’s devastating and empathetic film asks with whom responsibility rests for determining whether somebody else has lost the ability to make critical decisions in their own best interest.
Somewhere along the way, especially as Amanda’s sixteen-year-old daughter (Florence Hunt) starts to navigate newfound intimacies of her own in a fledgling romance, Queen at Sea widens and deepens into an illuminating study of the all-consuming hope and trust we must place in others to even consider embarking on long-term relationships, despite knowing we can never know our partners fully and recognizing the reality of our eventual declines as isolating, individual experiences. Winner of the Silver Bear Jury Prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, where it also earned Silver Bear wins for Courtenay and Calder-Marshall’s performances, Queen at Sea marks a long-awaited return to the screen for Hammer, whose neorealist debut feature Ballast was broadly acclaimed eighteen years ago. At that stage determining he couldn’t make a living directing indies while maintaining his creative liberty, Hammer pursued a career in architecture and investment, only returning to film when he felt he had found a creative risk worth taking.
His “portrait of a family struggling with dementia manages to feel entirely truthful without feeling contrived or manipulative for a moment,” assesses Sean. “The characters deal with themes of consent and autonomy in ways that are prickly, nuanced and realistic.” Queen at Sea is “just soul-crushing,” writes Brian, “but it does affirm my stance that Juliette Binoche is our best working actress.” Even though they “started open-mouth sobbing about twenty minutes in and never really stopped,“ Maz maintains this film is “the kind of movie that reminds you why movies are made, why they’re so important, why we need them and why we need to make them. It’s so fucking human.“ IF