Review: Queen at Sea

Director:  Lance Hammer

Stars:  Tom Courtenay, Juliette Binoche, Florence Hunt

One of the most persistent – and tired – tropes in modern horror cinema (as frequently proffered by the likes of A24) is the Scary Naked Old Person, or crone; a disturbing trend not for what it shows us, but for what it says about our feelings about the elderly, particularly in a sexual context. That there is something other and unacceptable in such notions, and that they are not to be seen, or even thought about. Lance Hammer’s long-belated return to directing is no horror picture, though it is among the year’s most darkly thought-provoking, and it contends with growing old, with sex and the sometimes-foggy borders of the altruistic and the selfish.

Amanda is a tenured professor on sabbatical from Newcastle in London to finish a book and to oversee the declining health of her mother Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall). One day she lets herself in to her mother’s three-storey townhouse to find her step-father Martin (Tom Courtenay) having sex with her. Evidently part of a pattern of behaviour he has previously been told to abandon, Amanda feels she has no recourse but to call the police and report it as a sexual assault, given Leslie’s increasing disorientation through dementia. Thus questions of consent are raised. Though Amanda’s main intention is to scare Martin into changing his behaviour, he is arrested, a social services risk assessment is deemed warranted, and the steady gears of bureaucracy start to turn. Flanked against this is a breezy coming-of-age story fot Amanda’s own teenage daughter Sarah (Florence Hunt), whose tentative first steps with James (Cody Molko) place the fraught, corroding intimacy between Leslie and Martin in an ever-perpetuating continuum or human connection.

These are thorny, emotionally volatile issues, close to taboo, but Hammer’s approach is fiercely controlled and contained. Leslie isn’t the only one at sea; neither Amanda nor the beat officers know the exact procedure for the dilemma occuring in the family homestead. We’re thrown into it at bracing speed, before any of the film’s internal rhythms have had any time to establish themselves. We’re with Amanda, reeling. Hammer boxes her in at the end of corridors or at the bottom of staircases against blank high-ceilinged walls. Like his central conundrum, there’s a conveyed feeling of being trapped in an off-centre space.

A forensic medical examination is called for. As disturbing as Amanda found her mother’s expression at the house, this intimate hospital visit seems to elicit more evident confusion and distress, only complicating the emotional fallout. Martin, for his part, is belligerent and angry that their marriage is being impinged upon. With only a narrow view to begin with, we’re inclined to see as Amanda does, that he is acting selfishly and exploitatively. But his unintended and manipulative presence at the social worker’s visit muddies the waters as we’re shown another view, that of the playful love and affection that exists between the couple. Nothing’s easy, nothing’s black and white.

Queen at Sea has a quiet intensity about it, brought about via long underplayed verité sequences, anti-sensationalist and procedural, bookended with classical music interludes that act as balms and bridges between the film’s sterner sections. The exceptions to this pattern are the excursions to catch-up with Sarah, which are often set to diegetic pop music streamed through phones in the ambient settings of tube trains and skate parks. The exuberance of the young actors is matched in the more relaxed modes of filming and the sense of improv in the exchanges. Sarah’s arc compliments the heavier material, but also acts as an occasional release valve for the pent up pressure between warring parties Amanda and Martin (so too does a wonderfully accidental shot of a fox in a cemetery – an almost metatextual catch).

“Do you think she feels love?” becomes a daunting existential question posed in regards to Leslie as those with their faculties try to see into her invisible prison. By necessity Calder-Marshall’s performance is the quietest in the film; a carefully mannered drift between the lost and the lucid. Binoche and Courtney, for their parts, remain lions of the silver screen. The best of their respective generations, here pitted not so much against one another but against the situation. Hammer’s methodology is bitingly unsentimental, but that is not the same as simply detached or inhumane. When it becomes clear that Sarah is in denial regarding her own father’s supposed return – he is settled lecturing in Montreal – Queen at Sea comes to feel like an examination of our tendency to freeze relationships in time, despite often cruel evidence to the contrary.

Responsibility is clearly the movie’s primary watchword. And even as a slightly-contrived further promiscuous episode in an alternative setting proves a watershed moment of realisation for Martin, this isn’t the pivot point for cathartic apologies. No one says “I’m sorry”. More interestingly, no one needs to. And while the film’s final spiral places the audience back into a position of reeling – Hammer fervently rejects a comforting close – it is juxtaposed almost jarringly with Sarah’s journey toward something new and optimistic, making this a roiling, daunting, frank sexual odyssey unlike any other.