Tom Courtenay (left) and Juliette Binoche in 'Queen at Sea.' Seafaring LLC Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Revolving around three generations of women - played by Anna Calder-Marshall, Juliette Binoche and Florence Hunt - within one troubled family, Berlinale competitor Queen at Sea offers a scathingly unsentimental look at the complexity of caring for an elderly person with dementia. Shot in London, this scrupulously realist work by multi-hyphenate Lance Hammer (his first directorial effort since 2008's Ballast) reportedly evolved out of intensive rehearsals and input from social services and policing experts who, in some cases, play fictionalized versions of themselves. That commitment to both technical and emotional veracity pays dividends all round, creating a work that's not exactly fun to watch but one that feels sincere, urgent and unflinchingly honest. Related Stories Movies Oscar-Nominated 'It Was Just an Accident' Screenwriter Released on Bail From Iran Prison Movies Lux Pascal, Rain Spencer, Rupert Everett and Lena Dunham Films Set for London's LGBTQIA+ Film Fest Queen at Sea The Bottom Line Sometimes love is not enough. Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)Cast: Juliette Binoche, Tom Courtenay, Anna Calder-Marshall, Florence HuntDirector/screenwriter: Lance Hammer 1 hour 56 minutes Although Hammer is an American, he's either picked up or been well-advised by cast and crew about the nuances of British life in the capital because so many of the details here feel precisely, thoughtfully calibrated. That goes for the set dressing in the elderly couple's north London townhouse in Tufnell Park (exactly the sort of address the couple would have been able to afford years ago that's now worth a gazillion times what they paid), the kind of puffer jackets the teenage daughter and her friends would wear, and the slang they'd use. (My only quibble is that Englishwoman Leslie, the character played by Calder-Marshall, would far more likely spell her name "Lesley," because Brits consider "Leslie" to be the "man's way" to spell that name. Ask me how I know.) Otherwise, everything here rings true as a newly cast church bell, right from the plunge-right-into-it opening scene. This finds Amanda (Binoche, immaculately natural as always) letting herself and her teen daughter Sara (Hunt, a Bridgerton veteran holding her own with ease) into the home of her mother Leslie and stepfather Martin (British national treasure Tom Courtenay). Not hearing a reply when she drops off the groceries downstairs, she goes up to check on them in the bedroom and catches them in flagrante delicto. Amanda's reaction is not so much shock as anger, like this has happened before, and she angrily tells Martin off for having sex with his wife; in Amanda's opinion, and that of the family's general practitioner, Leslie's dementia is bad enough that she can't be considered capable of giving full consent to marital relations, no matter how much she seems to be the one who initiates intimacy. Martin, on the other hand, insists that not all "experts" agree that dementia patients are incapable of consent, an impression he's clearly gleaned from that debatable fount of knowledge, Google. This is all explained through Amanda and Martin's arguments, shown sometimes fully in shot and sometimes just heard from another room as the camera sits motionless on the stairs like someone (Leslie or Sara, perhaps?) listening in and looking on from a distance. Furious and hoping to give Martin a good enough scare to teach him a lesson, Amanda calls the police and uniformed officers show up and arrest Martin, much to his and Amanda's distress. Later, special police liaison Emma (Michelle Jeram, a real-life sexual offenses investigator for the police) shows up and takes over the investigation, which leads to Leslie going to the hospital for a rape-kit assessment (performed by another real-life professional), which only distresses Leslie, and on it goes. From that phone call, a small, arguably well-intentioned if passive-aggressive act of do-goodery on Amanda's part, a whole series of unfortunate consequences cascade down upon the family. For starters, Leslie is hastily placed in a local care home, but that too goes horribly wrong. With nowhere else to go, Martin ends up coming back to his and Leslie's house, even though he's not supposed to be there. But it's soon obvious to both him and Amanda that he's much more adept at looking after Leslie's needs when it comes to getting her to eat, bathe and go to sleep. Meanwhile, it's not as if Amanda wants to be the one to lay down the law. An academic with a fully tenured position at a university in Newcastle up north, she's taken a sabbatical in London at a rented flat in a typically grotty-looking British high-rise so she ca