Director: Laura Wandel
Writer: Laura Wandel
Stars:Léa Drucker, Anamaria Vartolomei, Alex Dascas
Synopsis: Against hospital protocol and court restrictions, a compassionate nurse finds herself caught between helping a distraught mother and maintaining professional standards of care.
The Dardenne Brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc) are a director pairing that is as influential and inspiring as they are daring, becoming bolder as they have aged. Ever since The Promesse in 1996, they have remained a staple in French cinema (and constant Cannes Film Festival attendees–with their latest film again in competition this year) and shifted the cinematic landscape with their storytelling. They are known for their hyper-realist, socially conscious narratives, focusing on the struggling working-class, placing the characters on a journey that tests their morals, without melodramatic or sentimentalist beats attached for sympathy with the characters. Much like their storytelling, every aspect of their filmmaking is stripped down, from natural lighting to hand-held cameras, which employs a sense of intimacy and authenticity to the film.
It is as natural and grounded as it can be. You are immersed in the lives of these characters; you may have even encountered or known people who have gone through similar scenarios and communicated with someone who underwent such troubles. Their films feel less like constructed narratives and more like fragments of real lives—intimate, unvarnished, and eerily familiar. They have inspired many with this style and technique, one of the best modern examples being Laura Wandel, whose latest work, Adam’s Sake (L’Intérêt d’Adam, the opening film of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival’s Semaine de la critique), is not only influenced by them but also backed by the Dardennes.
Wandel, whose previous film, Playground, an honest and realistic drama about bullying and the toll it takes on both the children and their parents, put the spotlight on her as a storyteller akin to the Dardennes, although with a bit more dramatic sensibilities than that of Rosetta or The Son. Playground wasn’t the best film about the topic, but when watching it, you felt so connected with the story because it felt real–it made you think back about the days in high school and middle school. And even though her follow-up feature has more specific scenarios than her debut, Adam’s Sake has that same effective realist sting that she utilized before, cementing her as a potential heir to the Dardenne style of filmmaking.
Laura Wandel unfolds the narrative almost in real time, with each passing minute becoming as crucial as the next, set around a hospital with tons of chaos. And it is about to get even more tense. The film follows Lucy (Léa Drucker, who never misses a beat in her performances), the head nurse in an unnamed pediatric ward, constantly crawling with patients and their desperate parents. She has been following the case of a child called Adam (Jules Delsart), a four-year-old kid overcoming some serious health issues because of the poor diet restrictions imposed by his mother, Rebecca (Anamaria Vartolomei). The kid already has a broken arm from malnourishment, and he’s beginning to show signs of decline.
Lucy knows that Adam needs proper treatment to keep him healthy, but she has trouble making Rebecca cooperate with the care. The audience becomes frustrated, not because of the story beats, but because of the mother’s negligence, whose child is suffering and needs better care. However, Wandel begins to show the backend of the setting–how cruel and manipulative health institutions are to people–and that frustration switches to understanding. This change is gripping, effective to the point where you feel you are in Lucy and Rebecca’s position. Once more details about Rebecca and her child are shared, the story becomes even more powerful. Rebecca has been given court access to Adam twice a day because he can’t eat anything without his mother.
It becomes apparent that Rebecca and Adam don’t want to, and can’t, be without one another. The two mirror each other; Vartolomei and Delsart deliver performances so convincing you’d think they were mother and child. Child performances are nearly always mesmerizing because most haven’t had the experience that the rest of the cast might have had. But Delsart is something else. He slightly matches Drucker and Vartolomei, two of the best European acts working today, in terms of performance. Each second that passes, you feel a lingering sensation of forced separation, as an institution moves to distance this unbreakable bond. Lucy does her best to keep them together, but something bigger than her wants to prevent it. She fights back against an institution that strips people of their humanity.
Adam’s Sake explores more than the nurse and patient relationship; Wandel wants you to see them as humans and their protectors, who should (yet don’t) keep them safe. Wandel is very wise, so she does not judge her characters’ actions, whether it is Rebecca malnourishing her son or Lucy’s over-involvement in the case. This is an element that makes the film as effective as it is. There are many scenes in which Wandel could have swung towards melodrama, having her lead belt out their “Oscar scene.” However, she distances herself from that behavior and lets us linger in the moment, as if it were a real pediatric case.
We stay with these characters, corridor to corridor, hospital bed to hospital bed, and Wandel invites us to sit with the situation, to reflect without easy resolution. She questions the psychology behind the mother-son, doctor-patient, and institution-civilian relationships in a tad heavy-handed way, dwelling on the characters’ distress in many moments. Considering the muted nature of Adam’s Sake, one expects that Wandel didn’t rely on the stress-inducing pot-boiler act. Adam’s Sake is not a revelation in the same way as Playground was, but it affirms Laura Wandel as a filmmaker of striking empathy and formal precision. She refuses to moralize or manipulate emotions and allows the story to speak with raw honesty, echoing the Dardenne brothers’ legacy while charting her path. If the Dardennes represent the gold standard of realist European cinema, Wandel is well on her way to joining that conversation.
