For a solid decade, starting in the late 2000s with Disney’s charming fairytale comedy “Enchanted” all the way to Denis Villeneuve’s melancholy sci-fi “Arrival,” it was easy to trust Amy Adams, a six-time Academy Award nominee. Then, somewhere around Ron Howard’s cursed history-making “Hillbilly Elegy,” the romantic comedy sweetheart turned arthouse favorite began to slowly but steadily dilute that hard-earned belief, starring in lukewarm, critically-refuted projects such as Joe Wright’s “The Woman in the Window” and Stephen Chbosky’s adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen.”
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Kornél Mundruczó’s unexcitingly titled “At the Sea” does very little to disperse this unfortunate spell. Similar to his 2020 English-language debut, “Pieces of a Woman,” the new drama by the Hungarian director centers on a mother navigating the all-consuming swamp of grief. Adams’s Laura, the high-profile CEO of a crumbling dance company, is just out of rehab. She goes from one sheltered cocoon into another, moving back into her family’s Cape Cod summer home, where her loving husband Martin (Murray Bartlett) awaits with their disgruntled teen daughter Josie (Chloe East) and hesitant young son, Felix (Redding L. Munsell).
It is baffling how little grasp “At the Sea” exhibits of its main character, given that it is presented as a character study. While a certain formal playfulness is welcome in films exploring the non-linear nature of memory, Mundruczó goes out of his way to muddle any sliver of clarity. Laura, the daughter of an infamously ruthless choreographer, is said to have followed in her father’s footsteps. Still, there is little to no curiosity about her relationship to the art form itself. Adams, a professionally trained dancer, is seen here agonizingly curling and uncurling her toes to the beat of pantomime flashbacks of her dad’s drunken routines, a clumsy physical embodiment that only further confuses the protagonist. 
Making these sequences even more jarring, French cinematographer Yorick Le Saux seesaws between languid, overexposed sequences evoking the often tepid visual language of a perfume commercial and the rigid framing of soap operas, with a VHS tape of Laura’s speech that looks like it’s been lifted straight out of a Netflix B-show. It is also frankly unnerving how the camera captures the dancer’s 17-year-old daughter, lingering on her breasts and barely covered bottom with a voyeuristic lens that feels even more bothersome when the film’s only attempt to scratch the surface of her objectification is reduced to one tortuously misplaced scene that only further degrades the teen. 
If the scattered, unfocused structure of “Pieces of a Woman” was made more forgivable thanks to a career-crowning performance by Vanessa Kirby, Adams struggles to grant any tangibility to this road-to-recovery drama. The Oscar-nominated actress dips the same French fry in a tiny pot of ketchup a whopping dozen times while half-heartedly delivering what is meant to be a climactic monologue. She affectively takes both hands to her hips while scalding her meek, uninteresting husband. She feels just as adrift as her character, at times edging close to caricature, at others drifting into lethargy, never quite settling into the nuances of the character — perhaps a direct reflection of the director’s loose grip on Laura. 
The cast around Adams does little to help. In a rotation that looks straight out of a mid-season Saturday Night Live episode, Mundruczó introduces several comedy names to this stark drama, including Rainn Wilson as a grubby millionaire whose name would surely feature on the Epstein files, Jenny Slate as his unbearably screechy ex-wife now tethered to a buff non-speaking Italian boyfriend and a mustachioed Dan Levy as Dan Levy under the guise of playing Laura’s former assistant turned marketing director. Of all the cameos, Brett Goldstein is the most puzzling. The “Ted Lasso” star enters the film as a ghost, serving two futile and distracting purposes: to needlessly remind audiences how beautiful Amy Adams is and to deliver a maddeningly written monologue on the challenging road to sobriety, entirely built on a cheap kite metaphor. 
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In its staunch belief in the undying appeal of the white upper class and its white upper-class problems, “At the Sea” is a late addition to a very specific canon of American cinema that died back in 2008 and is now finding a second life in the hands of European auteurs. Alas, for a film that sets out to understand the specific malaises of the bourgeoisie at a time of increasing sociopolitical unrest around class inequality, Mundruczó’s drama feels not only tone-deaf but also egregiously vapid. [D-]
Rafa Sales Ross is a Brazilian film journalist, critic and programmer currently living in Scotland. She contributes to Variety, BBC Culture, Sight & Sound among others, and can often be seen writing about Latin American Cinema and explorations of death and desire.