QUEEN AT SEA Review

Lance Hammer made one film in 2008, won Best Director at Sundance, disappeared for nearly two decades, and came back with Queen at Sea, a movie about a woman, Amanda, watching her mother, Leslie, vanish into dementia while her stepfather keeps having sex with his wife. This is not a gentle return. This is a man who saved up eighteen years of something to say and decided to say all of it at once.

What Hammer does with this premise is not what you might expect. This is not a film that arrives with easy answers about consent and dementia, about what a husband of nineteen years is owed, about where the line is between intimacy and violation when one half of a marriage can no longer reliably locate herself in time. It sits in the discomfort of those issues with a directness that is genuinely hard to look away from and genuinely hard to look at. A rape kit examination scene is among the most harrowing things I have seen this year, not because of what it shows but because of what Leslie’s face tells you she understands, which is nothing, about what is happening to her.

Tom Courtenay as Martin is quietly shattering. He is not a monster. That is the whole terrible point. He is a man who loves his wife and cannot accept that the woman in that bed is no longer entirely the woman he married, and Courtenay plays that denial with such raw, bewildered grief that you cannot fully condemn him even when you know you should. The film does not let you off the hook by making this simple.

Binoche, as Amanda, is doing some of her most unsentimental work in years. There is a phone call Amanda makes to her estranged husband that strips away every layer of composure she has been holding together and exposes something that feels genuinely private, as if you had accidentally seen something you were not meant to see.

The subplot involving Amanda’s daughter, Sara, feels like it belongs to an earlier draft and never quite arrives in this one. The geographical setup takes longer than it should to resolve itself in your head. These are real imperfections in an otherwise unsparing piece of work.

But Hammer has made a film that asks questions most films about dementia are too frightened to raise. Where does love go when the body containing it becomes something else? What does the person disappearing still get to want? Hope is in short supply here. The actors carry you through anyway.

🍿 SCORE = 81 / 100