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Amanda (Juliette Binoche) enters the flat of her elderly mother, Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), who has dementia, and her stepfather, Martin (Tom Courtenay), unannounced to check on them and is immediately disturbed by what she sees. Queen at Sea begins abruptly at this heightened dramatic register then expertly compounds through cascading points of no return. This Pandora’s box of a film is writer-director Lance Hammer’s first in 18 years—belatedly following his acclaimed Mississippi-set drama Ballast—and it is an astonishing, unflinching return anchored by three towering performances. British New Wave thespian Sir Tom Courtenay (Billy Liar, Doctor Zhivago) is vulnerable but sharp, an archetypal angry young man now late in life, where rebellion and compassion are made indistinguishable. Calder-Marshall and Courtenay both won the Silver Bear in Berlin, and their shared history—she played Ophelia to his Hamlet on stage in 1968—gives their relationship depth and intimacy. And Binoche is characteristically masterful, by turns sympathetic and entitled, terror and regret written on her face as her seemingly reasonable decisions have unintended consequences. ~OO