Berlinale 2026: ‘At the Sea’ is an Entirely Useless Waste of Amy Adams

by Alex Billington
February 16, 2026

Every once a while a film comes along that is so miserably boring and uninteresting, there is nothing more that you’ll wish for than to get those 2 hours back. No matter which great actor pops up in this film, none of them are able to provide any kind of worthwhile performance to make it any better. It’s a complete waste of time and a waste of talent. At the Sea is the latest film from Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó, following up his previous films Pieces of a Woman (2020) and Evolution (2021). Unfortunately it’s probably his worst one yet – an especially dour, meandering, tedious mess of a film about an alcoholic woman who returns to her family after finishing a stint rehab. But it’s not really about that as much as it is about a group of stuck up, wealthy, dysfunctional people living in a big, fancy house on Cape Cod. Every day they wake up and go to the beach and then yell at each other and fight and that’s about it. And this just happens on repeat for nearly two hours. Amy Adams tries to make amends and show her family that she’s better, but they don’t really care. And neither do we, the audience, as none of these characters are worth knowing or interesting in any realistic way. Harsh to say but I was surprised by how every single person in the film is a proper a-hole.

At the Sea is the latest collaboration of screenwriter Kata Wéber & director Kornél Mundruczó, a husband-wife duo making provocative films for years before. It’s strange to wonder where the idea for this particular story came from. Do they know some alcoholics in real life and tried to tell their story? Or is it something they randomly came up with as an idea for a screenplay? Whatever it was, the At the Sea script is one of the most wholly boring, unoriginal, and instantly forgettable in any film I’ve seen at any festival recently. After finishing rehab, Laura returns to her family’s beach home, readjusting to her old life without her career that gave her identity. She faces her next chapter, forced to move on. Amy Adams plays Laura, a former ballet dancer also dealing with the trauma of being raised by a famous dancer / choreographer father who started his own dance company. She’s been living in his shadow her entire life. The film has strange flashbacks (and one terrible VHS tape scene) to explain this part of the story. But all of it feels so forced and so generic. They found a young actress who looks like young Amy Adams, but apparently she wasn’t good enough to perform any lines, so every shot of her is just a close-up without dialogue. None of it works, none of it is worthwhile.

I prefer not write many negative reviews (I’d rather devote my time and energy to championing great films) but when there’s one film that really, really bothers me I have to say so. And this one bothers me so much. The rest of the family in it is also annoying. The cast includes Murray Bartlett as Martin, Laura’s husband, Chloe East as Josie, their daughter, Dan Levy as Peter, her dance assistant, with appearances by Brett Goldstein, Jenny Slate, Rainn Wilson. None of them fit in this. It seems like they only cast Amy Adams because they needed someone to handle the complex, dark performance since she’s just sad and mopey the whole time. What are we supposed to take away from this story of a dysfunctional family? Why are we even watching? Does anyone know? This is the fundamental problem with the screenplay – there’s nothing unique or engaging about any of it. I don’t care about any of these people, and I don’t even feel anything for Laura. Every single line of dialogue you can visualize written on the page as they’re saying it. The performances are canned and stale, which is how the entire film feels. I’m always hopeful that maybe a film will shake things up in the second half, but this goes nowhere new, and ends up just spinning in the sand as the audience sits uncomfortably checking the time left. Sometimes there are stories we don’t need to tell. This is one of them.

Alex’s Berlinale 2026 Rating: 3 out of 10
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