Queen at Sea

Lance Hammer made Ballast in 2008, won the directing prize at Sundance with it, and then made nothing for eighteen years. Queen at Sea is his return, and it took three Silver Bears at the 2026 Berlinale: the Jury Prize, and a shared Best Supporting Performance for Anna Calder-Marshall and Tom Courtenay — the first time the festival's reconfigured performance award had gone to two actors in the same film.

Juliette Binoche plays the daughter of a woman whose dementia has advanced past the point of speech, opposite Courtenay as the husband who has been caring for her at home. The film is largely a series of conversations between people who agree that they love her and cannot agree on what she would want, staged in domestic rooms with a stillness that Hammer's admirers will recognise from Ballast.

What kept it from sentimentality, most reviewers agreed, is that it never resolves the disagreement into a lesson: care and autonomy are presented as genuinely competing goods, and the film declines to hand the argument to either side. It is a hard watch, particularly for anyone who has been in the room for a version of this conversation, and it is the strongest work of Hammer's very short filmography.