Cannes Review: Adam’s Sake is an Empathetic But Uneven Hospital Drama

Laura Wandel left a lasting impression with her debut feature Playground, a character study of a very young girl during her first school days, and was lauded for the depth of her engagement with the world as seen through the eyes of a child. Informed by the stricter realism of Belgian cinema, Wandel’s directorial approach […] The post Cannes Review: Adam’s Sake is an Empathetic But Uneven Hospital Drama first appeared on The Film Stage.

May 24, 2025 - 00:05

Cannes Review: Adam’s Sake is an Empathetic But Uneven Hospital Drama

Laura Wandel left a lasting impression with her debut feature Playground, a character study of a very young girl during her first school days, and was lauded for the depth of her engagement with the world as seen through the eyes of a child. Informed by the stricter realism of Belgian cinema, Wandel’s directorial approach is one of far-reaching empathy, with subjective shots and handheld camerawork to match on an image-making level. In Adam’s Sake, she swaps a school for a hospital’s pediatric clinic and allows for a wider social critique of the bureaucratic way such institutions are often run.

Léa Drucker (Last Summer) plays the role of Lucy, a senior nurse whose attentiveness is only matched by her strong sense of right or wrong. The first line, spoken by one doctor to another, sums up well all that’s to come: “We’re worried about Adam.” It is Lucy’s job to keep an eye on the 4-year-old boy (Jules Delsart) who refuses to eat the hospital food when his mother isn’t there. But the mom, Rebecca (Anamaria Vartolomei), has limited time to see him, per a recent court ruling which hospitalized Adam for malnutrition. The exact reasons remain a bit unclear until later, but it seems both the social worker and court deemed that Rebecca’s parenting put the child in danger.

From the outset, interactions between Lucy, Rebecca, and Adam are heated; they continue to simmer throughout a film that comes to tell of a young, single mother too proud to admit she could use some help through outbursts and rash actions. The little boy seems caught in the crossfire between two women who argue over what’s best for him: an overprotective mom and an overstepping pediatric nurse. Thus the main conflict seems to play out between the two, Adam having little-to-no agency or say––a narrative decision that’s quite surprising for a filmmaker who’s showed a predominant interest in children’s perspectives. With that in mind, the title Adam’s Sake now seems more ironic than genuinely concerned.

Though only 78 minutes, the film shifts near its end to redeem Adam’s character with a single line delivered abruptly and in close-up. It’s commendable how beautifully Wandel timed this to give Adam the dimensions one might expect from the director of Playground. But Adam’s Sake relies far too much on that moment, and on a catharsis for both Rebecca and Lucy––they eventually accept to see each other as a mirror, having shared the experience of bringing up their children alone.

Wandel does not, however, neglect the social mission of her filmmaking at large. Cinematographer Frédéric Noirhomme’s mobile camerawork we saw in Playground here follows Lucy across long tracking shots throughout the hospital, swapping over-the-shoulder for lower angles and occasional stillness of the frame when she’s consulting other patients. The camera is attentive even towards episodic characters and extras, suggesting the extensive and immersive research Wandel undertook before production. Adam’s Sake may nevertheless stand among the least-surprising recent hospital dramas––at least in comparison to something like Petra Volpe’s Late Shift, which played at Berlinale earlier this year––but a more generous reading of Wandel’s latest would celebrate its underscoring of hospitals and legal systems deciding on the wellbeing of a child without realizing how enmeshed those decisions are within a greatly varying parental context.

Adam’s Sake premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

The post Cannes Review: Adam’s Sake is an Empathetic But Uneven Hospital Drama first appeared on The Film Stage.