Queen at Sea review – crushingly sad dementia drama offers a startling portrait of intimacy

Driven by fine performances from Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall, Lance Hammer’s comeback is unbearable in its tragic candour and essential in its moral questioning

This inexpressibly painful and sad story – featuring angry, complex, brilliant late-career performances from Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall – is about dementia, the endgame of care and the decisions that need to be made when the spouse-carer is as vulnerable as the patient (and whose right it is to take those decisions). It is about the nature of intimacy between the two; and about the moment this becomes a problem for the grownup children with a conflicting sense of their own responsibilities.

Queen at Sea is directed by indie US film-maker Lance Hammer, absent since his 2008 Sundance winner, Ballast. This is an almighty comeback, a lacerating movie bearing comparison with Michael Haneke’s Amour or Gaspar Noé’s Vortex. It concludes with a heartbreakingly ironic and enigmatic final sequence refusing the traditional final cadence; a diptych of love, contrasting the pleasures and expectations of intimacy across the generations.