Queen at Sea. 2026. UK/USA. Written and directed by Lance Hammer. With Juliette Binoche, Tom Courtenay, Anna Calder-Marshall, Florence Hunt. DCP courtesy Greenwich Entertainment. In English, French; English subtitles. 121 min.
Is there anything more pleasurable than watching seasoned actors in a film worthy of their talents and intelligence? In Queen at Sea, Anna Calder-Marshall plays a woman afflicted with dementia, her body and mind slowly and irreversibly deteriorating, whose loss for words and loss of agency causes a bitter rift between her daughter (Juliette Binoche) and her devoted second husband (Tom Courtenay). The impossible moral agony they face—one that lays bare the most sacred intimacies of a marriage—is limned with exquisite candor and subtlety, so much so that we long to have witnessed the mirror images of Calder-Marshall and Courtenay when they were actors in the prime of their youth—she the Ophelia to his Hamlet on the British stage in 1968. We feel grateful, as well, for the return of the American writer-director Lance Hammer, some 18 years after Ballast, who graces us once again with a film of immeasurable compassion and unsettling ambivalence.
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