The Berlinale programme now includes keywords that are used to classify the films. 'At the Sea' (USA, Hungary 2026), the new film by Hungarian director Kornél Mondruszkó, is listed under the headings ‘Queer’ and ‘Music & Art’. In fact, there are no queer characters and the film is not about music & art, but about dance. Amy Adams plays Laura, a dancer who is no longer young and has spent six months in a ‘recovery unit' to overcome her alcohol addiction. Her return does not elicit much enthusiasm from her family. Her husband wants to sell the house on Cape Cod because the rehab clinic was allegedly so expensive; her 17-year-old daughter is angry because she had to look after her little brother. He, in turn, is reserved with his mother.
Laura has taken over her father's dance company as managing director. In flashback scenes, memories of her father emerge, who lived entirely for dance and paid little attention to his daughter. Laura is consequently traumatised, and as she struggles to break free from old entanglements she provokes her friends and family in the process. Amy Adams takes centre stage and carries the film with her intense presence. Australian actor Murray Bartlett, who attracted a lot of attention for his role as the hotel manager in the first season of ‘The White Lotus’, plays her husband, whom she suspects of having had affairs in her absence. Then there are the rich friends she meets at beach parties and divorce parties.
It's an impressive performance when the lies of life shatter and Laura tentatively sets out on the path to a new identity. But the story itself remains strangely diffuse and comes to nothing after two hours. Neither Amy Adams nor any other member of the cast made it to Berlin, which once again lowered the celebrity quota of the Berlinale.
At least one other heroine made an appearance on the red carpet, providing a brief moment of glamour. Juliette Binoche had come to Berlin to present the film 'Queen at Sea' (UK, USA 2026). She stars alongside Tom Courtenay, who at almost 90 years of age is an icon of British theatre and the New Cinema of the 1960s. Eleven years ago, he won the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlinale for his role as an elderly husband alongside Charlotte Rampling in ‘45 Years’. At that time, there were still male and female acting awards in Berlin before they were merged into a gender-neutral category.
Juliette Binoche plays (with a perfect English accent) Amanda, who cares for her mother (Anna Calder-Marshall), who suffers from dementia. One day, she “catches” her stepfather Martin (Tom Courtenay) having sex with her mother, notifies the police and sets off an avalanche of official measures. Allegedly, sex with dementia patients is abusive, and the stepfather is arrested as a potential rapist, while the mother has to undergo a painful gynaecological examination.
Amanda, who has custody, wants to put her mother in a nursing home, but the experiment does not go well. Her stepfather, who lovingly cares for his dementia-stricken wife, asserts his rights as her husband. This leads to a dramatic conflict, and one wonders whether it is not the daughter who is behaving abusively. Juliette Binoche claims custody of her mother, and Tom Courtenay stoically defends his position. Both are right from their point of view. In a parallel story, Amanda's daughter Sara (Florence Hunt) has her first sexual experiences. Only Amanda herself, who is separated from her husband, leads a sexless life. No wonder Juliette Binoche cries a lot.
Directed by Lance Hamer, ‘Queen at Sea’ is one of the best entries in the competition, not least thanks to its outstanding cast, standing out from a sea of mediocre films.
Great applause was showered on the film featuring a German heroine, 'Rose' (Austria, Germany 2026), directed by the Austrian Markus Schleizer, who takes us back to the 17th century in stark black and white images. After the end of the Thirty Years' War, the exact details are not revealed, the protagonist pretends to be a man and asserts her claim to a dilapidated farm with a title deed. With a scarred face and a bullet scar on her cheek, Sandra Hüller has been made up to look like a war veteran, but her voice and hands actually give her away.
For a while, everything goes well; she even gets married, but they sleep in separate bedchambers. On a stormy night, as the trees bend, she penetrates her wife with a strap-on dildo, but her wife nevertheless becomes pregnant, by whoever. At some point, Rose tells her wife and the audience her story of how she pretended to be a man during the war and obtained the title of ownership from a fallen comrade.
The two women agree to keep their shared secret and get along very well. Only the villagers become suspicious when a maid reveals that her “master” is not actually a man, but a “woman”. The deception is exposed, Rose is put on trial, sentenced to death and beheaded. The story is told from beginning to end in the style of a morality tale, in a language that sounds sometimes archaic, sometimes modern. Sandra Hüller was acclaimed in Berlin for her performance and is considered the natural favourite for the unisex acting award because of her gender-fluid role.
Except for the transgender aspect, much of it is reminiscent of ‘Le retour de Martin Guerre’ (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1982) starring Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye, which is based on a book by American historian Natalie Zemon Davis. While the French original is set in a specific region and time, the German-Austrian remake is set in a diffuse past, both in terms of time and location. The film is tailored entirely to Sandra Hüller as Rose; we see little of the villagers. In addition, everyone speaks perfect Standard German, which hardly corresponds to the historical setting. Nevertheless, ‘Rose’ is the critics' favourite so far and is likely to have a good chance of winning a major award, especially as the film has received top marks on the festival scale with 'Queer', ‘Queer Time Travel’ and ‘Fearless Women’.