Berlinale 2026: At the Sea, Queen at Sea, Nina Roza, The Loneliest Man in Town

There were two movies in the 2026 Berlinale Competition lineup with oddly similar titles. As fate would have it, one of them was among the best in the section, and one of them was the absolute worst.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. Kornél Mundruczó’s At the Sea, which stars Amy Adams as a mom in recovery after a drinking and driving accident nearly killed herself and her young son, is a barely watchable cringefest. Every year there’s at least one Competition film that makes me grind my teeth and consider walking out. I stayed through the duration here, but it wasn’t easy.

Let me say, there are some thoughtful movies about addiction at this year’s Berlinale. I’ve already mentioned If Pigeons Turned to Gold (still holding the top spot on my list), but I could also point you to the Bulgarian filmmaker Ralitza Petrova’s challenging but incisive Lust, or the Japanese film Numb, by Takuya Uchiyama. I’m sure there are many more, and I’d be willing to wager they’re all better than At the Sea, which has so little to say about alcoholism and motherhood, or being the head of a ballet company that she inherited from her father, which is the job Adams’s character is struggling to come to terms with. Honestly, so much of the movie is about whether or not she’s going to keep her job or quit, and the stakes could not be lower.

It’s a testament to Adams’s talent that she manages to come away from this, and pretty much every other movie she’s been in over the last ten years, unscathed. One continues to hope that her comeback film is around the corner. But this certainly isn’t it. There’s nothing interesting about her character, who fights with her husband, fights with her daughter, has a phony meet cute with Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein that goes nowhere, and occasionally thinks about having another drink. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before and done better.

The movie is written by Kata Wéber, who’s married to Mundruczó and collaborated with him on his previous films. Their work on 2020’s Pieces of a Woman could be criticized for various reasons, but that movie, about a woman who loses her child during a homebirth, was at least offering a story that hadn’t been told before. At the Sea is full of generic characters and their rich people problems, all leading up to a feel-good finale that strives for cinematic transcendence but had me rolling my eyes in disbelief.

But Queen at Sea? Here’s a film that is filled with honest, tricky emotions pertaining to family bonds and elderly dementia, a subject that doesn’t receive a lot of attention and yet is something that most people will have to grapple with at some point in their life. But maybe not the same way that Juliette Binoche’s character, Amanda, is grappling with it. The movie starts as Amanda and her teenage daughter accidentally walk in on her mom, Leslie (Anna Calder-Marshall), having sex with Amanda’s stepfather, Martin (Tom Courtney). Except that’s not what’s really happening, is it? Her mom has dementia, and she was just lying underneath Martin looking somewhat confused. Is it sexual assault? Amanda calls the police, but soon regrets it as Leslie and Martin’s living conditions are suddenly put under a microscope by British authorities.

The real conflict here is that Martin is a warm and gentle man who dearly loves Leslie, despite his unwillingness to recognize the problem he’s created. He dutifully cares for her every need as her condition continues to deteriorate. And Leslie loves Martin, and will try to instigate sex with him, even if she tends to not fully understand what’s happening moments later. It’s a genuine emotional and ethical dilemma, and it’s presented with such clarity by writer-director Lance Hammer that you’d be excused for thinking you’re watching a Ken Loach film – especially since a good portion of the movie charts the family’s experience as they navigate the various British public systems that Amanda’s call to the police drops them into. The film is rooted in such a specific place, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Hammer was a Brit and not an American.

Just within the Competition section, both Yellow Letters and At the Sea feature angsty teenage girls going through their coming-of-age growing pains while the adults wrestle with their own existential problems. While those films struggle to integrate their Gen Z subplots with much grace or originality, a good portion of Queen at Sea is focused on Amanda’s daughter Sara (Florence Hunt) and her relationship with a new boyfriend. Unlike the others, it’s a far more thoughtful and keenly observed addition to the story. All of these movies are trying to take into account the different ways in which the trials and tribulations of the parents affect the children, but Queen at Sea is the only one that manages that with artistry, elegance, and some insight. The direction and Hunt’s performance achieves the considerable feat of avoiding all of the cliches and eye-rolling characteristics that tend to befall teenaged characters. It made Sara’s part of the story a welcome diversion from the more fraught elements, rather than an annoying one.

But of all the performances by young actors at this Berlinale, I was perhaps most impressed with the twins Ekaterina Stanina and Sofia Stanina, who play Nina, the eight-year-old artist at the center of Nina Roza, the pleasantly enigmatic Competition film by the Canadian writer-director Geneviève Dulude-de Celles. The film’s main role belongs to Galin Stoev, who plays Mihail, a Montreal gallery curator who gets an assignment to travel to his home country of Bulgaria to verify the reports of Nina, and whether or not she’s a genuine child prodigy.

One of the most prominent connective themes at this Berlinale is identity, wherein characters travel home after a long time away and have to grapple with their lineage and the aspects of themselves that they can’t escape, no matter how far they run away. (See the aforementioned Lust, but also In a Whisper, Trial of Hein (Der Heimatlose), Rose, and Nightborn). In Nina Roza, it’s been a long time since Mihail has set foot in Bulgaria, and in the early scenes in Montreal we hear him disparage his homeland and question why his daughter and granddaughter would even be interested in speaking his native language. But that all changes once Mihail accepts the assignment and flies off to see Nina.

As Mihail investigates the mystery of Nina, and who she really is or isn’t, he also undergoes a personal reassessment, and it’s to the credit of Dulude-de Celles that all of this is related to the viewer in quiet moments of understanding – often captured solely in the eyes of actor Galin Stoev as the people he meets in Nina’s small, rural village subtly change him forever. But as much as it’s about Mihail’s identity, Nina Roza is also about why we make art and why the rapacious system of galleries and dealers has become so unhelpful. It hooks you with the questions about Nina and ends up delivering a moving portrait of a middle-aged man growing up by reckoning with his past. It’s never too late.

Which could also be the motto of Alois Koch, the old rock n’ roller at the heart of my personal favorite among the Competition screenings I caught, The Loneliest Man in Town. Directed by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel, the Austrian duo whose work often bounces between fiction and non-fiction. Their latest work blends the two by crafting a fictional story around a real musician who’s entering the last act of his life. Alois Koch is an 80-year-old blues musician who grew up idolizing Elvis Presley and still gets out to play his music, under his recording name of Al Cook. In The Lonelinest Man in Town, we find him at Christmastime, alone, playing Silent Night on his guitar, on the verge of losing his apartment.

Al is the last tenant standing. Everyone else in the old Viennese building has agreed to be bought out so that the new owner can tear it all down and build something new. Al’s place is like a living, breathing museum. He’s got his own little studio in the cellar, and his beautifully detailed apartment is filled with records, photos, and memorabilia that belongs to the real Alois Koch. Naturally, he refuses to sell – that is, until a large, rotund, tattooed landlord-tenant “liaison” makes good on his threat to move in, eat Al’s food and give him no other choice but to sign the deal. What’s the man to do? Well, sell all his stuff and finally fulfill his dream of moving to America, obviously. Like I said, it’s never too late. Eighty is just a number.

Watching The Loneliest Man in Town may remind you of Aki Kaurismäki, because Koch has the same stylish, deadpan, pompadoured visage that you’d find walking the streets of Kaurismäki’s Helsinki. There’s also the emphasis on music and observation over dialog and a particular kind of charm that makes you smile while tugging on the heartstrings at the same time. And good goddamn, is this movie charming. Even though it arrived near the end, long after festival fatigue had taken root and made me half delirious, I could have watched Alois Koch all day long as he said farewell to his belongings and the ghosts from his past – letting it all go in order to make room for an uncertain future. When he accidentally rekindles an old romance with a woman who left him in the 60s because she was way more of a Beatles fan than an Elvis fan, the movie had fully captured my heart like nothing else at this Berlinale.

In the next and final dispatch, we’ll wrap up this year’s coverage with a look at the prize winners, which were handed out this weekend amidst a pretty tense and politically charged ceremony.