‘At the Sea’ Berlinale Review: Amy Adams Dances Around Generational Trauma
After leaving alcohol rehab, a woman returns to her Cape Cod home and attempts to rebuild her fractured family while confronting the inherited trauma of her father—and an identity that threatens to pull her back under.
Laura didn’t spend six months working in Bali, as her husband has told friends and acquaintances. What she actually did was check herself into alcohol rehab. Now she’s back home in postcard-pretty Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where an uneasy welcome awaits: her irritated teenage daughter Josie (Chloe East), her younger son Felix (Redding L. Munsell), who wants nothing to do with her, and her husband Martin (Murray Bartlett), a painter doing his best to smooth things over in a house thick with unspoken resentments.
The family’s attempted reset becomes the central motor of At the Sea, a film that slowly parcels out the incidents and long-simmering tensions that pushed Laura—and everyone around her—to the brink. The daughter of a famous and controversial choreographer, a functional alcoholic until she lost control of her car and nearly her life in a serious accident, Laura returns haunted by her past and largely incapable of truly seeing, much less understanding, her children. Each of them, in turn, embraces a kind of culturally sanctioned acting out, stumbling into trouble—and dragging her along with them—as if by way of indirect punishment.
Meanwhile, the dance company she’s tied to is bleeding money, partners are threatening to walk (Rainn Wilson), a neighbor lends a hand when things get messy (a sadly underused Brett Goldstein), a friend is dealing with a health scare (Jenny Slate), and eventually Peter (Dan Levy), a fellow company member, emerges as Laura’s emotional anchor. But for the bulk of its 112 minutes, At the Sea remains fixated on the family’s halting, often thwarted attempts to rebuild a sense of stability—one that repeatedly teeters on collapse.
Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó—whose White God and Pieces of a Woman suggest just how punishing his cinema can be—opts here for a less brutal, more restrained approach. Even so, he struggles to find a dramatically satisfying trajectory. What begins as a story of reckoning gradually turns inward, circling itself in choreographic loops. Laura’s real struggle is to sever herself from an identity forged in the aggressive style of dance she inherited from her father—a not-so-subtle metaphor for a possibly abusive upbringing—and to discover a way of relating to others that isn’t defined by that legacy.
Mundruczó sprinkles in flashbacks, bursts of dance that often function as emotional release valves (that was always the company’s aesthetic), and a handful of warmer, more tender beats that surface once, after a series of conflicts and near-disasters, the family begins to recognize itself as collectively broken. Far removed from the confrontational edge of his earlier work, At the Sea attempts—only partially successfully—to probe the protagonist’s trauma and map how pain gets passed down through generations, even as breaking that atavistic chain proves anything but simple.
There’s something to be said for the fact that Mundruczó resists indulging his more sadistic instincts—every tense scene feels like it might tip into catastrophe—but the film ends up leaning just as heavily in the opposite direction, falling back on the now-ubiquitous “trauma plot” that seems to account for nearly every personal and familial dysfunction in contemporary prestige drama. Amy Adams, as ever, delivers the goods, even if she’s not the most intuitive fit for the role. The rest of the cast is an intriguing mix, with Mundruczó surrounding himself mostly with actors better known for their comedic work. Perhaps, in his view, stories about the sadness of the rich and accomplished aren’t all that far removed from comedy after all.
