The first time we see Martin and Leslie, the elderly couple at the centre of Lance Hammerâs 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 canât 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. Thereâs a whiff of sentimentality about it.
But any doubts about this storyâs willingness to confront difficult truths are blasted away by the next scene. Leslieâs daughter, Amanda, played by Juliette Binoche, pays a visit to the coupleâs 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 â sheâs told him before that their sexual relationship should stop â 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 familyâs 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. Itâs a deeply uncomfortable experience.
Ambiguity, however painful, is exactly what the filmâs director was aiming for. âWe werenât trying to convey a moral position,â says Hammer. âWe 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.â 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 (âitâs very alien to meâ, he says of the process of promoting the film, his first in 18 years), but heâs adamant that the narrative shouldnât come down clearly on either side. âI just donât think thatâs my role as an artist. My job is to question things, to present something thatâs complicated and let the viewer consider it more deeply than they would have.â
He does, however, have strong personal feelings about the central dilemma: âI think Amandaâs absolutely right to bring in the institutions. But she doesnât know what sheâs getting into, because how can you?â Has Martin committed a crime, in his view? âMartin loves Leslie, and heâs a human being so maybe heâs living in denial, or he hasnât been able to see the steps of erosion [of her mental capacity] because heâs so in it. You know, itâs like boiling a frog; he may not fully understand the peril sheâs in, and what consent means any more. Heâs just operating the way they always have their whole life, and theyâve loved each other deeply.â
That love is powerfully expressed in Courtenay and Calder-Marshallâs remarkable performances, for which they joint-won a Silver Bear at this yearâs Berlinale film festival: her portrayal of the particular bewilderment of dementia will be recognisable to anyone who has seen it in a loved one. Their own bond lends emotional depth to the dynamic â this is the first time theyâve worked with one another since playing Hamlet and Ophelia in 1968. Though they had fallen out of contact for decades, âtheir souls are entwined in some wayâ, Hammer says, and it seems real rather than mawkish. âWhen I was casting Annie, I had a list of people I didnât know, so I asked Tom because heâs worked with everybody. When he got to Annieâs name, he said: âAnnie! It has to be Annie. Cast her right now.ââ Together, they convey an intimacy borne of a bone-deep understanding, which extends to even minute gestures and changes in expression.
The difficulty comes as that understanding begins to crumble, unevenly and unpredictably. âIf thereâs any chance at all that you could be putting her in danger and she canât communicate it, then you just have to stop the action,â says Hammer. But as the fallout from Martinâs behaviour and Amandaâs call continues, the characters grapple with a cascade of problems: whether or not to place Leslie in a care home, how to protect her once sheâs there, whether to sell houses, change jobs, upend their lives. These are choices many will recognise from first-hand experience, but not, strangely enough, Hammer. Neither of his parents have dementia. âThis isnât from my own life,â he said in an interview earlier this year. âItâs just a moral dilemma that riveted me.â
Thatâs not the case with Binoche. On the phone from Paris, where sheâs shooting a film with Turkish director Berkun Oya, she tells me she has a parent with âa sort of dementia, not exactly Alzheimerâsâ, and has herself been trapped in the classic pincer movement between the demands of one generation and another. âI remember one time I stood up in the middle of the night thinking: how am I going to deal with this?â she says. âOne is going to the tomb, and the other one is [experiencing] all the teenage needs, feelings and emotions. I felt caught in a situation I had no control of.
âI admire people who stop everything and take care of their parents if they can. The thing is, usually we cannot because weâve got to work, we have kids, weâve got to run, and so weâre taken aback by the changing needs of older people. Suddenly, you realise youâve got to submit yourself to a system that is not made for human beings.â
Binocheâs view of the sexual question at the heart of the film is also subtly different from Hammerâs. âI mean, Lance answers yes: it was wrong. You know, heâs very clear about that. Me personally, itâs very difficult because you feel theyâre a couple, and also because she initiates those needs.â (Later in the film, we discover that Leslie often solicits sexual contact.) âI would say, like Lance, you have to protect somebody whoâs not fully himself or herself. At the same time, you wonder [about it]. And thatâs what the film is doing.â
So what does the law actually say? In England and Wales, the Sexual Offences Act of 2003 makes sexual activity illegal if someone is âunable to refuse because of or for a reason related to a mental disorderâ â which includes dementia â and if the healthy partner could be expected to know this. The capacity to choose whether to agree to sex can ebb and flow in someone with dementia â a diagnosis doesnât by itself mean they cannot consent, and guidance suggests that the consent doesnât have to be verbal. According to Dementia UK: âIf the person living with dementia responds positively and with obvious enjoyment when their partner makes sexual advances, there is every reason to believe they are consenting to sex. Alternatively, if their responsiveness, enjoyment or willingness diminishes, this could be an indication that they do not consent to sex, and this should be respected.â
All of which is easy enough to put down in writing, but seems impossibly difficult to adjudicate in practice. And while Alex Ruck Keene, a barrister specialising in mental capacity, agrees that dementia doesnât automatically mean sex canât be consensual, âif you simply donât have the ability to understand what a sexual act is, then itâs completely irrelevant that you appear to be enjoying itâ.
He continues: âFor a long period of time it has been recognised that the law is really not satisfactory, because youâve got two totally competing policy objectives. One is: consent must mean consent. I mean, we fought for that for years.â The other is to avoid interfering in lawful sexual expression. In the kind of case presented in the film, âif it doesnât appear to be that the husband is taking advantage of the wife, if it appears to be mutually pleasurable with no power imbalance, it feels weird to then say: âWell, the husbandâs doing something wrong.ââ In practice, where there is a complaint by a family member, the police may find it impossible to gather reliable evidence of an offence, making prosecution difficult. A local authority may, however, determine that safeguards â for example, stopping unsupervised contact â need to be put in place.
For Hammer, getting the procedural stuff right was vital, but the process was thrown into confusion when funding fell through, and a movie originally set in the US had to be reworked for Europe. âI researched it for a US scenario,â he says. âBut when we got to the UK, the institutional response is different.â He leaned heavily on experts to help fine-tune the script â so much so that some ended up acting in the film. âThey were brought on as consultants for research, and so I talked through the scenes with them. Weâd sit down in the workshop space and say: âOK, hereâs the way the sceneâs written. Is this accurate?â And theyâd say: âNo, it would be like this.ââ
He was particularly keen to capture the officialese used by police, sexual assault referral centre staff and social workers, and which marks such a stark contrast with the family environment. âI wanted their language,â he says. âItâs a very specific idiom and so I needed that from them, because I canât write it. I also knew I secretly wanted to cast them if they seemed like they could do it, and so I did.â Marie-Elle Vooijs plays a sexual assault clinician, her real job; likewise social worker Jean Pemberton. âIt took a little persuading, but they all wanted to [play these roles] in the end.â
For Hammer, making Queen at Sea â for which he won the 2026 Berlinaleâs Silver Bear jury prize â has been a long, slow process, but one he felt compelled to see through. This is his first film since 2008, when his debut, Ballast, won the directing award at Sundance. Why has there been such a huge gap between projects? (He tells me heâs supported himself in the meantime by making investments and doing the occasional architectural project.) âIt was just hard to find films to make that I cared about, and that I can also make a living doing. I stopped because it was not possible.â Does he have any qualms about returning with such a painful story? âWhen this subject came up, I realised it was dark and bleak, but thereâs meaning in it because a lot of people are experiencing this.â
Itâs an understatement to say that the end of the film doesnât offer audiences much in the way of solace. But Hammer is unapologetic. âWhen you make a choice to pursue a subject, youâre limited by it, and this is the subject. I didnât want to make it sentimental and heartwarming because thatâs not truthful, and with a lot of films about dementia thatâs the tactic,â he says. âSo then the question is: can I make the most truthful thing thatâs possible, and with the most beauty, the beauty [coming from] true loving relationships and compassion for the characters? Thatâs the goal. If you can manage that, you can make a film thatâs maybe worth watching.â
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