‘Adam’s Sake’ Review: A Hospital Becomes the Battleground for a Troubled Mother-Child Bond

Throughout the day depicted in the film, everyone involved believes they are acting, as the title suggests, for Adam’s Sake: the doctors, nurses, security guards, social worker, juvenile court representative, the mother herself, and all the other people who drift in and out of the situation as the hours go by. And yet, almost nobody seems to get anything right. Not the way they handle things, not their attitude, not the procedures they follow. Everyone has a different idea of what should be done, and nobody seems capable of agreeing on anything.

Welcome to life inside a Belgian public hospital, somewhere in the pediatric ward. That’s where young Adam (Jules Delsart) has been brought, apparently on the orders of a juvenile court judge, after suffering a broken arm caused by poor nutrition that has left his bones weakened. That’s about as much as the viewer initially knows, gradually piecing together the circumstances as director Laura Wandel follows the action with a restless, handheld camera, moving through the hospital corridors in the style of the Dardenne brothers.

The immediate problem is straightforward enough: Adam’s mother, Rebecca (Anamaria Vartolomei), wants to stay with her son around the clock, even sleeping at the hospital, while the staff only allows her to visit during designated hours. She insists that the boy cries whenever she leaves and refuses to eat unless she’s there. The doctor and the ward supervisor are uncompromising: rules are rules, and they must be followed.

The person caught in the middle is Lucy (Léa Drucker), a nurse who witnesses the situation firsthand and tries to find some middle ground. She allows Rebecca to stay longer than the regulations permit, lets her feed Adam and makes other concessions, convinced that this is the best way to protect the bond between mother and son and prevent the situation from escalating to the point where Rebecca might lose custody.

The trouble is that the relationship between Rebecca and Adam is so intense, and so deeply codependent, that nobody seems able to establish any boundaries, not even Lucy. The first major confrontation revolves around food. Lucy brings Adam a meal to help him regain some weight, but the boy refuses to eat it, claiming (or perhaps genuinely believing) that it will make him sick. His mother throws the food away and gives him a kind of homemade purée instead. The film never fully explains what’s going on or why Rebecca behaves this way. What becomes apparent, though, is that she may not know how to properly care for her son, or that her particular way of looking after him may actually be putting his health at risk. And this is hardly the last time such concerns arise.

Adam’s Sake largely unfolds from Lucy’s perspective. Having been a single mother herself, she identifies with Rebecca and feels sympathetic toward her predicament. But her attempts to bend the rules and push the limits of what the hospital will allow don’t seem to work particularly well either. Perhaps the doctors and security staff are the ones who have the clearest understanding of what’s at stake, but Wandel portrays them in a rather blunt, unsympathetic manner, suggesting that their main concern is simply to get rid of the problem as quickly as possible.

The director essentially follows the Dardenne playbook, particularly that of their early films, with a constantly moving handheld camera that stays close to Lucy as she navigates the hospital corridors. It’s an effective approach to a complex, ambiguous and, in its own way, unsettling story. The fact that the institutions are actually doing their job only makes matters more complicated, since Wandel refuses to establish clear heroes and villains or neatly divide the characters into those who are right and those who are wrong. Rebecca clearly adores her son, but their relationship is also deeply troubled. The state is trying to protect the child, yet seems incapable of understanding the emotional subtleties of that bond. And Lucy, for all her good intentions, may be making things worse, perhaps using her involvement in their lives to work through some unresolved issues of her own.

The film’s intensity, its brisk pace and the mounting anxiety generated by the apparent impossibility of resolving the situation between mother and child are its greatest strengths. At times, however, Adam’s Sake leans so heavily into ambiguity that it leaves some important aspects of the story frustratingly unexplained. It also introduces a few rather contrived developments later on, seemingly just to create additional conflict. These are relatively minor shortcomings in an otherwise compelling film. Wandel’s second feature once again confirms that the Belgian filmmaker is among the finest heirs to the Dardenne tradition, even if this is a film that owes almost everything to the masters who came before her.