A bone-deep connection … Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall in Queen at Sea. Photograph: © Seafaring LLC View image in fullscreen A bone-deep connection … Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall in Queen at Sea. Photograph: © Seafaring LLC Film ‘If you can’t understand what sex is, it’s irrelevant if you seem to be enjoying it’: how Queen at Sea upended the dementia drama Lance Hammer’s first film in 18 years is a heart-wrenching masterpiece about family, mental decline and sexual consent. He and supporting actor Juliette Binoche discuss how they brought unabashed realism to a condition rarely seen on screen
David Shariatmadari Fri 4 Sep 2026 09.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google T he first time we see Martin and Leslie, the elderly couple at the centre of Lance Hammer’s wrenching new film, Queen at Sea, they are walking together up a set of stone steps: one of their regular outings, we assume, in days filled with pottering and quiet companionship. They have their backs to us, and we can’t see their destination beyond a bleached sky that fills the top half of the screen. Symbolically, it may be deemed a bit on the nose: two people near the end of their lives, moving gently towards the white light of oblivion. There’s a whiff of sentimentality about it.
But any doubts about this story’s willingness to confront difficult truths are blasted away by the next scene. Leslie’s daughter, Amanda, played by Juliette Binoche, pays a visit to the couple’s house in drizzly, middle-class north London, her teenage daughter in tow. Unable to find her mother and stepfather, she arrives at the bedroom door. Opening it, she finds Martin (Tom Courtenay) on top of Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), who lies impassively beneath him, the mask of dementia obvious on her face.
Mortified and angry – she’s told him before that their sexual relationship should stop – Amanda calls the police, unleashing a series of upheavals that make for often excruciating viewing. No one in their right mind would countenance the possibility of ongoing, nonconsensual sex. But neither would anyone look approvingly on the cold, hard edge of officialdom as it slices through the family’s status quo, leaving Leslie confused and frightened. As we see her disoriented by physical separation from her partner and learn more about their relationship, the audience is forced to hover between two contradictory perspectives. It’s a deeply uncomfortable experience.
Ambiguity, however painful, is exactly what the film’s director was aiming for. “We weren’t trying to convey a moral position,” says Hammer. “We were trying to say that this is a story with a lot of confusing parts, and we want you to experience it and come to your own conclusions.” Hammer is briefly in London on his way to the Edinburgh International film festival, having landed from LA the night before, and we meet in the mercifully cool Curzon offices on one of the hottest days of the year. The 59-year-old, who trained as an architect and had a career as an art director on big-budget movies, is thoughtful and reserved (“it’s very alien to me”, he says of the process of promoting the film, his first in 18 years), but he’s adamant that the narrative shouldn’t come down clearly on either side. “I just don’t think that’s my role as an artist. My job is to question things, to present something that’s complicated and let the viewer consider it more deeply than they would have.”
He does, however, have strong personal feelings…