![\"Amy](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/a23b9946ae82da60a92104649fac6e4a.jpeg\"\/)
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Amy Adams in Kornel Mundrucz\u00f3\u2019s \u2018At the Sea\u2019 (ATS Production)<\/p>\n
The 2026 Oscars haven\u2019t even happened yet, but Amy Adams<\/a> will likely be in the running next year for her towering performance in Korn\u00e9l Mundrucz\u00f3\u2019s<\/a> At the Sea (which premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival on Monday evening). Adams has already received six nominations across her career<\/a>, for films ranging from David O Russell\u2019s bombastic crime comedy American Hustle to the melancholy indie Junebug, but she\u2019s surely never faced a role as demanding or rewarding as this.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 she\u2019s been there for six months trying to get sober, after smashing up a car in a drunk driving incident.<\/p>\n The screenplay by Mundrucz\u00f3 and his wife Kata W\u00e9ber 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\u2019s absence, the family seems to have just about held together, but cracks don\u2019t take long to appear. Most ominously of all, we discover that they can no longer afford to live in the moneyed Massachusetts enclave.<\/p>\n Mundrucz\u00f3 has stated that the structure of the film is loosely inspired by Chekhov\u2019s The Cherry Orchard. In its forensic analysis of an artistic family confronting its demons, At the Sea also evokes memories of Eugene O\u2019Neill\u2019s Long Day\u2019s 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, \u201cI have this vacuum inside me which wants to suck out anything good in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n The brilliance of Adams\u2019 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\u2019s interests ahead of her own for once.<\/p>\n Amy Adams at an Apple TV event earlier this month (Getty Images)<\/p>\n At the Sea isn\u2019t all storms and stress. Mundrucz\u00f3 also takes the opportunity to skewer the Cape Cod set. Laura\u2019s neighbours are wealthy, hedonistic types, materialistic and wildly selfish. Everybody is trying very hard to keep up appearances. Laura\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s house.<\/p>\n Some of the most resonant moments here are the quietest ones: a scene in which Laura\u2019s son is so mistrustful of her that he won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n![\"Amy](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/c0db5fdb72a853addc3eac70abd9f0e1.jpeg\"\/)
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