At the Sea, Berlin Film Festival review – Amy Adams could finally win her Oscar with this raw alcoholism tale

The 2026 Oscars haven’t even happened yet, but Amy Adams will likely be in the running next year for her towering performance in Kornél Mundruczó’s At the Sea (which premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival on Monday evening). Adams has already received six nominations across her career, for films ranging from David O Russell’s bombastic crime comedy American Hustle to the melancholy indie Junebug, but she’s surely never faced a role as demanding or rewarding as this.

Adams plays recovering alcoholic Laura, with the very first image of the film a huge close up of her sallow face. The camera gradually pulls back and we see that she is drumming with ferocious concentration. This is a musical exercise at a rehab centre – she’s been there for six months trying to get sober, after smashing up a car in a drunk driving incident.

The screenplay by Mundruczó and his wife Kata Wéber gradually reveals her back story. She has been running a leading New York ballet company founded by her tyrannical and neglectful father. Now, her own family is in danger of falling apart. On release from rehab, she is whisked back to the Cape Cod summer house where her artist husband Martin (Murray Bartlett from The White Lotus and The Last of Us), teenage daughter Josie (Chloe East), and young son Felix (Redding Munsell) are waiting for her with trepidation. In Laura’s absence, the family seems to have just about held together, but cracks don’t take long to appear. Most ominously of all, we discover that they can no longer afford to live in the moneyed Massachusetts enclave.

Mundruczó has stated that the structure of the film is loosely inspired by Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. In its forensic analysis of an artistic family confronting its demons, At the Sea also evokes memories of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Characters who at first glance seem carefree and well-adjusted all turn out to be wildly neurotic and insecure. Laura herself is still fighting her own self-destructive tendencies. As she puts it, “I have this vacuum inside me which wants to suck out anything good in my life.”

The brilliance of Adams’ performance lies in its subtlety and restraint, as well as its emotional rawness. Much of the dramatic tension here comes from her struggle to keep things together: to make appointments on time and to put her family’s interests ahead of her own for once.

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At the Sea isn’t all storms and stress. Mundruczó also takes the opportunity to skewer the Cape Cod set. Laura’s neighbours are wealthy, hedonistic types, materialistic and wildly selfish. Everybody is trying very hard to keep up appearances. Laura’s husband has spun a yarn that she has been away in Bali researching a new project, because he knows the vulture-like relish with which her so-called friends would prey on her if they knew she had been in rehab. Dan Levy provides comic relief as her former assistant, now the ballet company’s head of PR, who has ventured up to Cape Cod to try to persuade her to get back to work. Rainn Wilson is also good value as the boorish, ultra-rich George, the benefactor of the company but also the one who wants to buy Laura’s house.

Some of the most resonant moments here are the quietest ones: a scene in which Laura’s son is so mistrustful of her that he won’t eat the ice cream she has bought him, and another scene in which she struggles to make even the slightest emotional connection with her teenage daughter.

Mundruczó’s 2020 film Pieces of a Woman had a searing, Oscar-nominated performance from Vanessa Kirby as a young mother whose home birth goes disastrously wrong. At the Sea is less claustrophobic and ultimately more uplifting, but it confirms Mundruczó as a real actor’s director, with a showcase for Adams that will most likely lead her to awards glory this time next year.

Dir: Kornel Mundruczó. Starring Amy Adams, Murray Bartlett, Chloe East, Brett Goldstein, Dan Levy. 112 mins

‘At the Sea’ is awaiting UK distribution