Queen at Sea Review: A Heartbreaking Dementia Drama on Intimacy and Care
Lance Hammer's Queen at Sea is a crushingly sad dementia drama that offers a startling portrait of intimacy, driven by fine performances from Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall. This inexpressibly painful and sad story marks Hammer's almighty comeback since his 2008 Sundance winner, Ballast, and is unbearable in its tragic candour, essential in its moral questioning.
Plot and Setting
The film is set in a gloomy and wintry London, with porridge-grey cloud cover. Juliette Binoche plays Amanda, a recently divorced academic on sabbatical with her teen daughter, Sara (Florence Hunt), to be closer to her elderly mother, Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), who has dementia, and her stepfather, Martin (Tom Courtenay). One dull weekday morning, Amanda catches Martin and Leslie having sex, with a mask of incomprehension on her mother's face. Furiously, she accuses him of raping Leslie, a shock stemming from his role as stepfather and the GP's advice that Leslie can no longer give meaningful consent.
Moral Dilemmas and Conflicts
Martin has done his own research online, contradicting the GP, claiming marital sex comforts dementia patients just as much as other care without consent, such as food or medical aid, and crucially, it comforts the carer too. Icily livid, Amanda calls the police, setting in train events she instantly regrets. Martin is prevented from seeing Leslie, who is terrified by the rape exam and baffled by his absence. The only way to suspend legal action is for Leslie to enter a care home, Amanda's long-standing demand, which Martin furiously resists as a malicious, dishonest move.
Meanwhile, Sara develops a relationship with a boy at her new London school, unknown to her mother. The story moves from one agonisingly difficult situation to the next, each a point of no return with things seen and said that cannot be undone. Is Amanda right, or has she mishandled things? Is Martin an abuser or misunderstood? Is the care home itself bad? Even the crisis around older people's sexuality and abuse propensity does not solve these questions.
Key Scene and Themes
The crux is a four-way conversation between a social worker, Amanda, Martin, and Leslie, featuring Martin's tearful declaration of love and a virtual reaffirmation of vows, poignantly returned by Leslie. Has dementia made her affirmation valueless? Queen at Sea is a film with tragic, wintry candour, bearing comparison to Michael Haneke's Amour or Gaspar Noé's Vortex, and concludes with a heartbreakingly ironic final sequence refusing traditional closure.
This lacerating movie explores dementia, endgame care, and decisions when the spouse-carer is as vulnerable as the patient, questioning whose right it is to decide. It delves into intimacy between the two and when it becomes a problem for grownup children with conflicting responsibilities. Each ordeal is a function of an overall situation that can only be managed up to a point, making it a profound and essential watch.
