‘At the Sea’ Review: Amy Adams Gasps for Air in Film Desperate to Drown Her Under the Weight of Water [C] Berlinale

Amy Adams gazes just past the camera. Her expression is tired, hollow, as if any additional emotion would already be too much. In this extended opening close-up lies everything At the Sea promises: a radical interior study, an unvarnished portrait of a woman, a drama about addiction, shame and the impossibility of simply finding solid ground again after nearly drowning. It is a striking beginning which is perhaps the most concentrated moment in the entire film.

After six months in rehab, her character Laura does not merely return home; she washes ashore. Like driftwood carried back by the tide. The sea off Cape Cod glistens, the light is soft, the wind moves meaningfully through tall grass and loose strands of hair. But neither the postcard idyll nor the architectural grandeur can conceal the fact that this is a family in quiet crisis. Her husband Martin (Murray Bartlett) performs normalcy, her daughter Josie (Chloe East) meets her with open hostility) and her son Felix (Redding L. Munsell) with cautious distance. Laura herself feels like a stranger in her own life: a woman standing on land, yet still swallowing water inside. She used to be the star of her late father’s renowned dance company, growing up in his shadow and carrying on his legacy to this day. Her functional alcoholism was ignored by everyone until an accident occurred in which her young son Felix was in the car with her. Her being back in her natural environment is something not only she has to come to terms with, her family also struggles with suppressed anger, financial worries and the difficulty of forgiving one another. 

Director Kornél Mundruczó, reuniting with screenwriter (and wife) Kata Wéber, tells of a woman who believes she has survived the worst, only to find the past seeping back in like saltwater through floorboards. After the formal audacity of Pieces of a Woman, he adopts a quieter register: no bravura long takes, just waves that swell without fully breaking. The motifs like an alcoholic father, artistic inheritance, the sea as repression are familiar but heavily underlined. Hardly a metaphor goes uninterpreted, hardly a feeling left unspoken: rising wind signals memory, a kite spells out release, bloodied ballet shoes literalize emotional wounds. The film wants healing to feel like a slow return to shore, yet it explains that movement instead of letting us experience it. As the symbolism swells, ambiguity recedes. Psychological nuance gives way to a drawn-out therapy session, circling the same emotions instead of diving deeper. The return to the life once fled holds real dramatic potential, yet yields stasis: micro-escalations replace true transformation and the threat of relapse lingers on the horizon without ever breaking into a storm.

What is obvious and shouldn’t come to any surprise is that Amy Adams commands every frame with bruised and breathtaking restraint. She is undeniably the film’s gravitational center. With a brittle, almost resistant melancholy, she plays Laura as a woman bracing against emotional undertow. Her sobriety does not feel like solid ground but like a fragile sandbank one strong wave away from erosion. Adams does not perform breakdowns, but she erodes. And therein lies her power. She does not externalize conflict; she presses it inward. We watch her trying not to feel or rather, trying to survive feeling. Especially when the film reaches for grand gestures, Adams counters with stillness.

Even her performance cannot keep the narrative from revolving solely around Laura, reducing others to satellites in her storm and mirrors of maternal failure. The inherited dance company hints at questions of power and identity but dissolves into another symbol of guilt, while the choreography meant as catharsis feels merely illustrative. Though Cape Cod is shot with atmospheric polish, its beauty turns her crisis decorative, the audience understands her pain without being submerged in it. And yet the film glimmers in fleeting moments: a memory that hits like cold water, a charged glance between mother and daughter, a quiet realization that healing is less revelation than a slow, exhausting swim.

As exhausting as it may be, At the Sea does not seem to be the kind of material that will carry Amy Adams back to potential Oscar triumph, but it is undeniably a significant step up from some of her projects in recent years. The film is consistently well acted, atmospherically shot and thematically ambitious but it’s also a work that loves its own metaphors too much and affords its characters too little freedom from them. A drama that claims depth without fully illuminating it. This character study bravely turns inward toward its protagonist’s psyche, yet too often drifts along the surface of its own symbolism, rather than allowing its waves to crash fully onto shore.

Grade: C

This review is from the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, where At the Sea had its World Premiere in the Competition.