The actress makes a return to form in this hard-hitting film from Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó about a middle-aged woman facing up to addiction – and her traumatic childhood.
Amy Adams is a transfixing screen actress, but she’s had a bad run of it lately: her last truly successful project was a TV one, 2018’s Sharp Objects, while films like execrable potboiler The Woman in the Window and clunky suburban satire Nightbitch have come and gone without much noise. So it’s great to report that she is given a chance to showcase her prodigious gifts again in At the Sea, the latest English-language film from Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó, which has premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.
The role of a recovering alcoholic reassessing her life is an ideal showcase for her special kind of fearless openness as a performer. Indeed, having been nominated for an Oscar six times but never won, Adams deserves to be in contention for a seventh nod with this performance.
The drama is the second in a loose triptych of films by Mundruczó dealing with women in crisis at different stages in life: the first, 2020’s Pieces of a Woman, starring Vanessa Kirby, dealt with a young woman coping with the loss of a child. Now he has turned to middle-age, and the focus here is on a painful psychological trade-off that feels particularly pertinent to mid-life: when a person comes to really understand the damage of their upbringing, but also how they may be impacting others with that in turn.
Adams is Laura, the daughter of a famous choreographer who was once a dancer herself, and has now taken over his dance company; we meet her as she is finishing a stint in rehab. When she’s picked up at the airport by her teenage daughter Josie (Chloe East), the role reversal is notable, with the latter affecting the weariness of a harried parent dealing with a wayward child. When they then get back to their picturesque Cape Cod home, her husband Martin (The White Lotus’s Murray Bartlett) and son Felix (Redding Munsell) treat her with similar distrust.
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