‘At The Sea’ review: Amy Adams leads Kornel Mundruczo’s uneven follow-up to ‘Pieces Of A Woman’

Dir: Kornel Mundruczo. USA/Hungary. 2026. 112mins

Amy Adams delivers a compelling performance as recovering alcoholic Laura in Hungarian director Kornel Mundruzco’s second English-language feature. Adams’ pressure-cooker turn as a woman struggling not only to stay on the wagon but to rebuild her life as a mother, wife and designated heir of her father’s dance company binds together an uneven drama of stops and starts, of intense dramatic peaks and long troughs.

Audiences need to trust Adams to pull them through a long, slow first-act build

At The Sea lacks the breathless intensity of the director’s first English-language film, Pieces Of A Woman, which earned its star Vanessa Kirby an Oscar nomination, although it contains a few moments of humour, peppered throughout the script’s more engaging second half. Audiences need to trust Adams and the character she plays to pull them through a long, slow first-act build, lulled by the windswept grandeur of the Cape Cod setting. That trust will eventually be repaid, but perhaps not amply enough to secure the film widespread play following its Berlin Competition debut.

This intimate drama is at its most trenchant when it parlays a story of Laura’s healing process into a reflection on the way women are sidelined and silenced by men who think they know what’s best for them. It’s at its most conventional in a series of flashbacks that chart how it all began with the young Laura’s treatment at the hands of her creative genius of a father. And it’s at its most original in a handful of virtuoso sequences in which emotional conflict is expressed through dance.

Laura is first seen in extreme close-up, looking towards the camera but not at it, her sagging face lost in some inner turmoil we can’t access. The camera pulls back to reveal that the percussive soundtrack is being created by Laura and her fellow rehab centre patients as part of a music workshop. Soon enough she’s back at home with husband Martin (Murray Bartlett), teenage daughter Josie (Chloe East, excellent) and younger son Felix (Redding L. Munsell) – the latter of whom was in the car Laura totalled in the drink-driving accident that sent her into rehab six months previously.

Laura used to dance, and is the nominal head of a celebrated dance company set up by her late father – played in flashbacks by real Hungarian dance legend Pal Frenak. She is under pressure from the stalled dance company’s board to return to active service and make plans for the future. Martin is keen to sell the handsome New England beachside house that was Laura’s family home in order to balance the family budget. And everyone gets jittery when she tries to spend some time alone with Felix – especially Josie, whose adolescent anger has become entirely focused on her absentee mother.

Throughout, there is hardly a scene in which we’re not watching Laura or seeing what she sees. Adam nails the selfish single-mindedness of recovery  – her character is not yet ready for intimacy, not even sure she’s ready to go back to being a mother. The only person who seems to understand this is the one man who wants nothing from her – a former addict played by Brett Goldstein, who briefly enters Laura’s life around the time the story starts to bite and engage. Martin, dance company board member George (Rainn Wilson) and even her gay best friend and colleague Peter (Dan Levy, whose sparky turn is the vector of much of the film’s late-period humour) all try to shape her narrative. Laura wasn’t in rehab, they’ve told friends and the media, she was in Bali. When she tries to tell her own story, she’s literally outvoiced.

The family’s handsome wooden house with its large garden leading down to a wide beach washed clean by Atlantic breakers seems the idyll place for recovery. With its steep stairs and old family photos, the house is a place where the past needs to be negotiated; the garden is a mysterious limbo space fullof hiding places; the beach holds out the promise of a freedom that needs to be worked towards. It’s here that a final mother and daughter dance sequence takes place, fluidly shot by Yorick Le Saux.

This is one of four choreographed sequences that stand a little to the side of the action, not perfectly integrated but exhilararating in their own right. One is set to Barry White’s smooch-disco classic ’You’re the First, My Last, My Everything’ – just one cog in a surprising, restless soundtrack that leaps between pop tracks, a classical emotional counterpoint score by Sacha & Evgueni Galperine and three contributions by Hiyao Miyazaki’s go-to composer Joe Hisaishi; one of which is that thundering drum-session intro.