“You’re arresting me for having sex with my wife.” Martin (Tom Courtenay, 89) lives with his wife Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall, 79), an artist who now has advanced dementia. She is the mother of Amanda (Juliette Binoche) who visits them in their house in Tufnell Park, north London, and finds a thrusting, half-naked Martin, her stepfather, on top of an immobile, blank-faced Leslie.
Amanda calls the police. She’s asked him to stop this before; he says she has no right. But her mother can no longer give consent and, thinks Amanda, could be harmed. It’s tantamount to rape. Or is it?
It’s a tribute to American writer/director Lance Hammer’s extraordinary subtle direction (he’s also an architect and this is his first film since the acclaimed Ballast, set in the Mississippi Delta, in 2008) that the visceral horror you feel at Amanda’s decision, which she regrets soon afterwards, gives way to a realization that nothing is clear-cut, ethically or otherwise.
“I just wanted you to wake him up so he’d stop doing it. They can’t be separated, he loves her dearly,” she tells the police, who come remarkably quickly and declare the bedroom a crime scene. The cast and ensemble acting – Hammer practices extended workshopping, improvisation and collaboration – are exceptional. The film won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the Berlinale and it’s a reunion for Courtenay and Calder-Marshall, who were first paired in Hamlet, as Hamlet and Ophelia, on stage at the Edinburgh Festival in 1968.
But it remains hard to believe that Amanda would be so hasty as to risk subjecting her demented mother to the unnecessary nightmare of a forensic medical exam with swabs and a speculum, as well as risk-assessments and interviews with social services (Hammer uses a real social worker and sexual assault doctor who haven’t acted before) when Martin is clearly Leslie’s mainstay. “Is he coming?” asks Leslie (pictured below) when she and Amanda set off for the police station.
They’ve been married for 18 years. Where was Amanda all that time, asks Martin. Just short visits at Christmas and birthdays? How can she have any understanding of their relationship? He’s heard that some geriatric psychiatrists believe physical intimacy is beneficial though their GP does not. Amanda is on the GP's side. She’s horrified that Martin is still taking Viagra. Even if, as he says, Leslie is often the one who instigates sex, disinhibition is the consequence of the disease. If there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s that once the balance is tipped, the domino effect is inevitable.
It’s often an unbearably painful film to watch, but the cinematography of Adolpho Veloso (Train Dreams, 2025) brings calm and beauty, with dark rooms, stairs and illuminated figures at the top, and the London landscape, including the Northern line, shines. Martin and Leslie, wearing an embroidered coat and using a stick, go for slow daily walks on the Heath, looking like any peaceable elderly couple. And the Balfron Tower, the east London high-rise where Amanda and her teenage daughter Sarah (Florence Hunt; Bridgerton, pictured below) live, has a very different urban flavour.
They’ve moved from Newcastle for a year while Amanda is writing a book, on sabbatical from her job at the university. She’s separated from her husband, who’s teaching in Montreal, though Sarah yearns for them all to reunite back in Newcastle. That’s not going to happen, Amanda tells her. Sarah carries on her life regardless, focusing on new excitements: smoking joints in the park with schoolfriends and boyfriend James (Cody Molko), filming each other, scrolling on their phones, joking about ancient penises (she spotted Martin’s – “an old dude’s hard-on” – in that fateful first scene). It’s a welcome relief from the agonising decisions that Amanda has set in motion.
A care home doesn’t bring the advertised respite. Instead, there’s a sexual “incident” where Leslie is seen emerging from another resident’s room half naked. Martin storms out with her and takes her home. “You’re right,” he tells Amanda. “We need a nurse.” But the routine of their life together has been fatally disrupted. There’s no redemption here, no false attempt at a happy ending, only a powerfully moving portrayal of a heart-rending situation where no one has the right answers.
