Tom Courtenay, 89, Anchors Lance Hammer's Dementia Dilemma 'Queen at Sea'

Lance Hammer returns to cinemas on October 30 with Queen at Sea, his first film since Ballast in 2008, and it premiered at the 2026 Berlinale led by Tom Courtenay and Juliette Binoche. Courtenay, who turns 89 this month, delivers what our review's verdict calls a performance of real weight — though the film around him has a visible kink.

The premise is blunt. A woman walks in on her elderly mother and stepfather having sex and, in a moment of panic, calls the police. She and the authorities then spend several days determining whether the mother, who has advanced dementia, communicated sufficient consent. The inquiry puts her relationship with the stepfather on thin ice.

The stepfather is Martin, played by Courtenay. Binoche plays Amanda, the daughter who wishes to remove her mother from Martin's creaky, lived-in home and check her into a nursing facility. The mother is played by Anna Calder-Marshall, the veteran actress who played Cathy opposite Timothy Dalton's Heathcliff in the 1970 Wuthering Heights.

What does the comeback look like?

Ballast, Hammer's debut about suicide in the Mississippi Delta, won honors everywhere from Sundance to the Independent Spirit Awards. Before that, Hammer worked as a special-effects artist. Then he stepped away from filmmaking directly after his breakout success. As comeback films go, the review notes, "they don't come much thornier than Queen at Sea."

The Berlinale connection runs deeper than one premiere. Eleven years ago Courtenay arrived at the festival with Andrew Haigh's 45 Years, playing a doddery romantic whose selfish tendencies threatened the marriage at the film's core. Both Courtenay and co-lead Charlotte Rampling took the festival's acting awards that year, and Rampling later earned an Oscar nomination. Courtenay's voice, the review observes, has taken on the texture of Ratatouille-era Peter O'Toole.

Where the film wobbles

The review's sharpest reservation concerns Binoche's Amanda, who — "whether by fault of her performance or Hammer's direction" — comes off as a little irrational and cold. That imbalance, it argues, makes what should be a curious moral paradox feel one-sided, and the results are "slightly less delightfully ambiguous" than Haigh managed in 2015.

The visual craft is not in dispute. Shot on location and on 35mm by Train Dreams cinematographer Adolpho Veloso, the film "looks consistently gorgeous," particularly in exteriors around Balfron Tower in East London — the Brutalist structure non-UK viewers may recognize from 28 Days Later.

How heavy is the watch?

The film lacks the severity of Vortex or Amour, and the formal trickery of The Father. Even so, this frank depiction of dementia "can be upsetting to watch." Hammer's counterweight is a romantic subplot between Amanda's daughter Sara — played by Bridgerton's Florence Hunt — and a local boy, which lets the audience catch fresh air. The contrast of a relationship in bloom against one fading into "the deepest winter" ultimately feels, in the review's words, a bit on-the-nose.

The verdict lands on balance: "A fine drama, nonetheless." What that changes for Hammer is considerable — an eighteen-year gap between films is rarely bridged by a Berlinale slot and an October theatrical release, even if the film's central paradox never fully balances its two leads.