Queen at Sea
Lance Hammer (2026)
Writer-director Lance Hammer’s debut feature Ballast was released in 2008. Queen at Sea is his first film since. As well as an eighteen-year gap, there’s a big cultural and geographical distance between the two films’ settings. The characters in Ballast are part of a poor Black community in the Mississippi Delta. Queen at Sea takes place across the Atlantic, in and around upmarket Tufnell Park, London NW5. The area is home to an elderly couple, Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall) and her second husband, Martin (Tom Courtenay), who have been together for eighteen years; they met soon after each had lost their first spouse. Leslie, whose first husband was French, has a daughter from that marriage: Amanda (Juliette Binoche) was raised in France is but now an academic in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Separated from her husband, Amanda also has a daughter, late-teenage Sara (Florence Hunt), and they’re currently staying in London, in a rented flat. They’ve moved south while Amanda is on sabbatical leave, so that she can be closer to her mother, who has dementia, and her stepfather, who is his wife’s carer. It’s of central importance to Queen at Sea that Martin is also still Leslie’s lover. In the opening scene, Amanda, with Sara, arrives at the Tufnell Park terraced house one morning to find Martin making love to Leslie. Amanda is horrified, insisting that her mother is no longer cognitively capable of consenting to sex. She then phones the police to report the incident. Queen at Sea goes on to describe the ensuing crisis in Amanda, Leslie and Martin’s lives.
Whereas Ballast’s African-American cast had little or no prior acting experience, here Lance Hammer has in the main roles esteemed European actors of exceptionally long standing. Juliette Binoche made her cinema debut in 1983. Tom Courtenay made his in 1962! Anna Calder-Marshall is less high-profile, internationally at least, but has regularly appeared on television and in films since the late 1960s. You can well understand why Hammer wanted to work with this trio, and he’s richly rewarded. The casting of relatively minor roles is very different. Florence Hunt is well known (though not to me) for Bridgerton; some of the youngsters playing kids that Sara knows in London have acted before. Steven Cree is the manager of a care home to which Leslie is briefly admitted, but the other health professional and public services personnel in Queen at Sea are a mixture of less familiar acting pros and non-actors who really do, or have done, the jobs of their characters. The first group includes Mohammed Amiri (as a police officer) and Alison Pargeter (a nurse who eventually helps with Leslie’s care at home), the second group Jean Pemberton (a social worker), Elizabeth Rushbrook (another police officer), Michelle Jeram (an officer specially trained in the investigation of sexual offences) and Marie-Elle Vooijs (a doctor at a sexual assault referral centre). Lance Hammer must be commended for orchestrating so effectively the playing of such a diverse cast.
As with Ballast, Hammer is also his own film editor. He does a good job with that too, but his screenplay is all over the place. The minor issues may simply reflect an American’s limited understanding of the country where he’s chosen to set his story, although you’d have thought someone involved in the production might have put him right. For a start, I know spelling isn’t supposed to matter nowadays but ‘Leslie’ is a male name in Britain – the female form is ‘Lesley’. Amanda, on sabbatical ‘to write my latest book’, tells one of the officials who interviews her, that she has ‘tenure’: not in the British higher education system, she doesn’t – Hammer presumably uses the word just to indicate (to an American audience) that Amanda has an open-ended rather than a fixed-term contract. When Amanda broaches with her daughter the possibility of staying in London indefinitely, Sara asks, ‘What about your job?’ and her mother airily replies, ‘I’ll get another’ – seeming to mean another university appointment. Simple as that, though it probably wouldn’t be, particularly for an academic in late middle age (we don’t find out what Amanda’s academic field is). There’s no mention of the huge difference in property prices between London and Newcastle. No serious mention either of Sara’s education or how it may have been interrupted by moving to London temporarily. She’s merely supplied with those friends from school or elsewhere, including a prospective sexual partner, James (Cody Molko).
The script’s larger defects disfigure the narrative. When the police, after initial enquiries at the house, arrest Martin for further questioning, Amanda is shocked and bewildered – she seems to find this an unthinkable consequence of calling 999 and reporting a sexual assault. Released on bail later the same day, Martin immediately violates his bail conditions by returning home (though it’s unclear where else he was meant to go at such short notice). After heated discussion, Amanda gives in to his insistence on staying in the house overnight, on condition that he won’t be there the following morning, when someone will visit to assess Leslie’s health and domestic circumstances. Next morning comes, and Martin stays put. In response to the assessor’s understandable concern about this, Amanda pretends that she misunderstood the bail conditions and thought Martin had to be present to meet with the assessor. That’s hardly enough to explain why the assessor then allows Martin not only to sit in on the meeting but also contribute to the discussion, often speaking on Leslie’s behalf.
It emerges that the only medical opinion about Leslie’s cognitive state so far available is her GP’s. Although Amanda says something about trying to get a report from a geriatric psychiatrist, there’s nothing to suggest that happens. In the face of Martin’s implacable opposition to Leslie’s moving to a care home, Amanda tries to compromise with the suggestion of ‘respite care’ rather than a permanent move – it’s not clear which of these has been agreed when Leslie does in due course enter the care home. Martin was presumably released from police custody on pre-charge bail while a police investigation continued, but it doesn’t continue beyond the point at which the assessor is ready to ignore Martin’s violation of bail conditions. Are we meant to think that legal proceedings against him are simply dropped as a quid pro quo for Leslie’s going into care? In that case, what are the implications of her exit from the care home after only a couple of days? Yes, the incident that prompts Martin to remove Leslie from care also persuades him to change his mind and admit that she can’t make independent decisions about having sex: he assures Amanda there won’t be any more of that at home. Back in bed with Leslie, Martin’s as good as his word – when Leslie initiates sexual contact, he gently but decisively stops her. But doesn’t he need to assure someone more than his stepdaughter? It’s incredible that he and Leslie are allowed to revert to their earlier domestic arrangement without any kind of supervision or restrictions.
Plenty of people will take the view that implausibility and loose ends are unimportant in a film focused on exploring, and challenging its audience with, big issues – dementia, geriatric sex, the end of life. (Mark Kermode’s is the only British review so far interpreted as a green splat on Rotten Tomatoes, apparently because he found the film ‘relentlessly grim’.) Lance Hammer, on the one hand, takes pains – through his casting of key small roles, sequences like the SARC doctor’s examination of Leslie, and visual details like the old woman’s soiled pants in the film’s closing stages – to make Queen at Sea real, sometimes gruellingly so. On the other hand, he sets up situations that he then ignores. Hammer probably didn’t set out to critique the English legal and social care systems – intended, rather, to use them as a context for a human tragedy story. To do that honestly, he still needed to get the systems right and to develop his story according to what they dictate.
Leslie seems to be in care just a couple of days. The day after her arrival, the manager, Jonathan, sends Amanda a video that shows her mother settling in contentedly and enjoying making art. (I wasn’t sure whether Leslie had been a professional artist, but painting and drawing are clearly things she’s done well for years past.) The next morning, Jonathan phones to report that an incident which ‘seems to be sexual’ has taken place. Amanda and Martin hurry to the care home, to be shown CCTV footage from the previous day. Leslie is seen in a corridor; an elderly man speaks to her before both disappear into a room off the corridor; Leslie then emerges from the room naked from the waist down. Jonathan admits this kind of incident does sometimes occur at the home, and that the male resident concerned has been involved in similar incidents before. Amanda and Martin are reasonably appalled – even more appalled when they go to see Leslie and find her sitting close beside the same old man and looking pleased about it, though she’s pleased to see her husband, too. This is the last straw for Martin, and Amanda doesn’t argue. They remove Leslie from the home immediately.
In arguments between Martin and Amanda, he has always insisted that he knows Leslie better than she does, that it’s usually Leslie who wants sex, and that she still derives pleasure from it. The care home debacle is one of the storyline’s stronger elements in that it vindicates Martin’s view that Leslie is much better off at home with him but also forces him to change his mind about her cognitive abilities. Although dementia is centrally linked with geriatric sexuality in Queen at Sea, the film is more unusual for exploring and illustrating the latter than the former. (Iris (2001), Away from Her (2006), Still Alice (2014) and The Father (2020) are just the best-known examples of dementia cinema since 2000.) The attention given by Hammer to ageing bodies makes some startling demands on his two elderly co-stars, both of whom are fearless. Anna Calder-Marshall, eighty next year, is the more persistently unprotected of the pair – not only is Leslie always at the mercy of others but also has much less to say than Martin. Tom Courtenay, a decade older than Calder-Marshall, at least has ample opportunity to use a voice that still has music in it and – never mind that Martin is often angrily exasperated and distressed – a naturally humorous undertow. That complements the glimmering humour in Anna Calder-Marshall’s mobile face, and these qualities are a boon in Queen at Sea. Any cineaste of my generation is likely to feel grateful for Courtenay’s very presence in the film – I certainly did. In his late seventies, he gave one of his most memorable film performances in Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years (2015). Now approaching his ninetieth birthday, he gives another.
45 Years was based on a short story by David Constantine, and Queen at Sea’s opening shots – among the most eloquent in the whole film – call to mind lines in Constantine’s poem ‘Photomontage’. The poem’s subject is the long duration of a marriage and what ends it – ‘… and didn’t we bear it out/To the edge and over the edge of doom?’ At the start of the film, Martin and Leslie, arm in arm, ascend a long flight of steps, presumably from a subway to street level, and, at the top, disappear. Stairs are an important element in Queen at Sea. All three main characters make repeated journeys up and down the staircase in the Tufnell Park house; there’s more than one comment about how steep the stairs are (though nothing happens in consequence). The staircase is also starkly uncarpeted. Here and elsewhere in the house, the walls are painted a cold blue grey. There are a few pictures on the walls (Leslie’s?) and books on shelves. If Hammer and his DP Adolpho Veloso mean to convey bleakness, they certainly succeed, but the place doesn’t have a lived-in look.
There’s another aspect to the décor that I’m not keen on – the same thing I resisted in Amour (2012), Michael Haneke’s superior study of an elderly married Paris couple, with the stricken wife cared for by her husband. That couple, played by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, were retired music teachers; the woman’s first ischaemic episode (a prelude to crippling strokes) occurs late one evening on their return home from a classical concert. We learn that Leslie and Martin first met in the audience for a classical concert, in Paris, and the classical music that sometimes plays in their home seems meant to be even classier because it’s on vinyl LPs. A TV set is as conspicuous by its absence from the house in Tufnell Park as it was from the Paris apartment in Amour. As in Haneke’s piece, art, books and the right sort of music are judged appropriate to the solemn story Hammer is telling but watching telly is infra dig.
The tensions between Martin and Amanda also faintly echo Amour, where there was friction involving the couple’s daughter. The echo is only faint because Amanda is a much more important character than her counterpart in Amour; you’re reminded of Haneke’s film, even so, because the daughter there was played, like Amanda, by a top-drawer French actress – and because, although Juliette Binoche’s role is so much bigger than Isabelle Huppert’s was, it still seems underwritten – or, at least, doesn’t hang together. It’s a testament to Binoche’s charisma and innate truthfulness as a performer that she disguises this so well.
The chief downside to Queen at Sea‘s focus on senior-citizen urges and needs is the plot strand that charts Sara’s progress towards her first sexual experience. The film ends tragically for the older generations. Martin and Amanda are somewhat reconciled once Leslie returns home, the sex stops and a nurse is recruited to take some of the load off Martin. After a walk one day, he comes home to find Leslie, who has diarrhoea, loudly refusing to be washed by the nurse. Martin says he’ll take over and the nurse leaves. Leslie, by this stage, is so fearfully unsure of everyone that, when Martin gets her into the bathroom, and tries to remove her pants to wash her, she aggressively pushes him away. He slips, falls and hits his head on the floor tiles. Leslie gazes as blood pools around his head. Amanda arrives to discover what’s happened. Lance Hammer intercuts between these scenes and Sara preparing to have sex with James, then leaving his house. This first-love, compare-and-contrast subplot has never seemed more than a makeweight in the film. Its inclusion in the finale to Queen at Sea verges on tasteless.
23 September 2026