“Queen at Sea”: Dementia and Consent

There are films that unsettle because they move us at the deepest level. Queen at Sea belongs to that category: a painful and profoundly sad work. Lance Hammer’s new film—winner at Sundance in 2008 with Ballast—which premiered in the Official Competition of the 76th Berlinale, ventures into one of the most uncomfortable territories of contemporary cinema: dementia, the endgame of care, and the moment when decisions cease to be medical and become moral.

Queen at Sea opens abruptly with a disturbing scene. Amanda (Juliette Binoche) and her daughter Sara (Florence Hunt) visit her elderly mother, Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), and her stepfather, Martin (Tom Courtenay), only to find them in the bedroom making love. Amanda’s anger seems inexplicable for a few seconds, until the central issue upon which the rest of the film pivots is revealed: the sexual consent of an elderly woman with dementia.

It is such a crucial issue because it brings together multiple dimensions of old age and responsibility: the evolution of a deep and devoted relationship that the ravages of dementia do not entirely erase, yet which is compelled to renegotiate its terms of interaction. Is the person Martin loved still there?

In one of the film’s most significant scenes—indeed, nearly all of them are—Amanda, Martin, Leslie, and a social worker engage in an open conversation about the elderly couple’s relationship. Martin argues for the benefits of sex and its role in care and attachment, in the sense of security it provides his partner, as part of his wholly devoted attention to his wife. He also questions the assumption that Leslie does not consent, challenging the certainty with which others interpret her condition.

What Amanda initially considered worthy of police intervention—triggering a chain of unwanted consequences that far exceeded her aim of protecting her mother from what she perceived as an inappropriate continuation of her former sexual life—gradually takes on a different meaning for her. The intrusion of professionals—police officers, forensic examiners, social workers—into the fragile bubble of well-being primarily disrupts the lives of the elderly couple, in the name of a greater good that proves difficult to justify. Ultimately, Queen at Sea is about love when it can no longer sustain reality on its own. It is about the moment when intimacy becomes public, when private decisions must be shared—or contested—within the family. And it revolves around the question that runs through the entire film: is care an expression of love, or a form of denial?

Martin’s initially rigid stance gives way to resignation, and the daughter’s anger evolves throughout the film into greater understanding—heightened by the failed attempt to place her mother in a nursing home as a supposed solution to the problem.

Initial positions gradually blur; negotiation with the other and openness to a different point of view—grounded in the indispensable requirement of unconditional love—make it possible for the reconfiguration of family dynamics to be shaped not by confrontation but by dialogue. Yet this proves insufficient to manage a situation in which affection alone does not suffice, particularly when the caregiver is himself elderly.

Amanda, a university professor in Newcastle, lives with her teenage daughter during a sabbatical in London in order to care for her mother. The demands imposed by caregiving affect the entire family unit and, in this case, unfold in parallel with her daughter’s emerging relationship with her classmate James, opening a complementary and inverse path to the love story of her grandparents.

The triptych it could form alongside Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012) and Vortex (Gaspar Noé, 2021) would stand as essential testimony to how cinema can venture into the least photogenic regions of reality without disguising or romanticizing them. Hammer’s realism is meticulous: the interiors—both the elderly couple’s family home in London’s Tufnell Park and Amanda’s brutalist apartment—shift from pastel tones to more solid hues (also coordinated with Binoche’s wardrobe). On the one hand, they frame the elderly couple’s simple life, with its carefully filmed comforting routines—classical music and breakfasts; on the other, they evoke unease, sleepless nights, conflict, and provisionality, as well as midnight conversations with the ex-husband who now lives in Canada.

Queen at Sea is a complex and important film, carried by outstanding performances, particularly from veterans Courtenay and Calder-Marshall—whose moments of lucidity are as convincing as their absences—while Juliette Binoche endures and interrogates herself, as in her finest roles, revealing an inner struggle and a shift in attitude that render her Amanda more human and more real. Precision, detail, and a naturalism that immerses us in both apparent simplicity and underlying complexity compel us to question whether love ends when memory fades.