This astonishingly complex and morally ambiguous masterwork is the film of the year so far.
On the outside, the second feature film from director Lance Hammer, who took an 18 year hiatus after his excellent debut Ballast, sounds eerily familiar. A story about an older couple struggling with rapidly accelerating mental dissolution as a result of dementia. Just this year Familiar Touch graced our screens and offered a powerful alternative in an attempt to remedy some of the disease’s harsher elements and understandings. But with Queen of Sea Hammer utilises an ingenious and wholly unique angle to tackle his subject and the result is as hauntingly ambiguous as it is brilliantly, thornily immediate.
On what would have been another day checking in on her mother Leslie, (Anna Calder-Marshall) Amanda (Juliette Binoche) and her daughter Sara (Florence Hunt) head over to her striking and old fashioned London house. Only when they open the door to her bedroom, Amanda’s stepfather Martin (Tom Courtenay) is having sex with Leslie while she lies underneath, a sort of pained yet unreadable expression on her dementia induced, dissociated, face. Amanada is furious, revealing she has already asked Martin to stop but he has repeatedly heeded the warnings and now she’s calling the police. Thus beginning an unbelievably complicated, contradictory and dubious exploration of the psyche and what it means to give consent as our minds develop from youth to the desolation of unrecognisable old age.
Hammer begins the film as a chastation of Martin and it’s hard to see him as anything other than immediately monstrous. Leslie is not one hundred percent lucid enough to ever really give consent despite Martin claiming, through potentially scrupulous google MD definitions, that the intimacy may actually be helping the dementia. He’s the typical, grumpy, older villain but while Amanda has forged a life teaching in Newcastle it is him who has been with her mother every second of every day for the past 18 years. But eventually as the seriousness of the situation slowly seeps in we soften towards, without fully sympathising with Martin. It’s like he’s had some sort of delayed epiphany, yet the damage is already done.
There are constant, genius hints at life before and after the fact that make the film impossible to hold down. Leslie can’t say it but she does seem to truly love Martin, or is his presence just a ghostly, holographic comfort that she’s become used to? He can be volatile and angry but he’s also caring for his wife all on his own which is a mental and physical toll that could shake even the strongest of characters. There are never any easy answers to the genuinely bold and fresh questions Hammer is asking of his characters and the audience. There are plenty of Schrodinger’s cat type instances of he said, she said that deepen and add heft and gravitas to the puzzle.
The film’s engaging complexity is only as effective as its actors, and the central foursome regularly astonish with almost improvisational authenticity. This is complemented by a host of non actors and real medical professionals that make every tough appointment and explanation feel real and lived in. It is no surprise that Juliette Bionche absolutely shines here, her maternal yet deeply distracted mind being caught between raising her daughter, also excellently played by Hunt, and worrying constantly about her mother. There is a separate, coming of age, hangout narrative casually playing out alongside the main drama where Sara finds first love and is seemingly forging a life for herself that is the total antithesis to her grandma. Calder-Marshall is devastating in her role as Leslie, she’s barely autonomous but gives just enough to question whether her locked away mind has signs of primal life.
But it is Tom Courtenay who has the hardest and most impressive role to get right. He manages to make Martin feel like a sprawling man of varied principles, caught between the life he lived and the new one he can’t understand. Martin hums with sadness and a sense of helplessness that he can’t manage to control or fully, convincingly change. Hammer constantly extends the barriers between the family with fantastic framing and blocking and there’s a lingering feeling that Amanda and her stepfather perhaps haven’t always got along. Faces are put into focus when the tough conversations are more directly linked to them, Leslie’s head splits Amanda and Martin at the table as they spoon feed her. Every decision, every action feels huge and unknowable.
Hammer claims he took this huge break because he refused to conform to what studios wanted from him after the success of Ballast. Instead he’s been teaching film and focusing on academia, imparting his wisdom on young minds. And in many ways that is the greatest building block for Queen at Sea, the refusal to accept a singular narrative for a heavily saturated and successful topic of discussion on screen. It is less a film about the actual disease rather than the lurking destruction and reality it creates in its recipients home before bursting out to engulf their loved ones. Maybe this fractured and separate journey of discovery for Sara is Hammer telling us that there’s more to the human condition than black and white facts, that it is how we behave and live consistently that will give us our karmic retribution or reckoning.
5/5
Queen at Sea opens a Pandora’s box of uncomfortable questions and creates a completely new examination of the mind and a mental quandary for the ages.
