By Michael Roddy

When we first see Amy Adams (Lois Lane of the Superman movies, “Junebug”, “American Hustle”) in the Berlinale competition film “At the Sea” she is pounding away outdoors somewhat distractedly on a set of drums along with other people doing the same.

In other words, she’s doing the kind of thing people do at retirement homes, therapy or in rehab, the latter of which it turns out is precisely where she is.

In Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó’s film, based on a screenplay by his wife Kata Wéber, Adams plays Laura, who has been away from her Cape Cod home for six months of rehab after flipping her car, in which her son was a passenger, in an alcoholic haze. He emerged unscathed — except emotionally — but what she remembers most vividly about the crash was him watching as she was taken away in an ambulance.

Six months later, she arrives home to deal with the emotional and psychological trauma caused by the crash but also by her behaviour before the crash, and deeper still, the emotional scarring she suffered at the hands of her fanatical and phenomenally successful modern-dance choreographer father, whose troupe she inherited when he died. The little girl her father mostly ignored and otherwise emotionally abused is a phantom who shows up from time to time, with one of the repeated frames being of her smashing a bottle against a wall.

The emotional as well as financial and marital mess Laura returns to is daunting. Her husband Martin (Murray Bartlett), is a wildly unsuccessful painter some of whose paintings blemish the walls of their fashionably rambling Cape Cod house, which was Laura’s family home. Martin tells her he’s had to take on gardening for their rich friends in order to pay the bills.

Teenage daughter Josie (Chloe East), who picks up Laura at the airport “because Dad couldn’t make it” resents that her mother’s crisis has interfered with her prospects of getting a college scholarship. She also is having a fling with a guy who is in his 20s while she is a minor — and under the age of consent. Felix (Redding Munsell), at least at first, just ignores her.

Laura’s problems are compounded because their rich neighbour (Rainn Wilson) is the head of the board of Laura’s dance company. He holds the keys to the funding and, knowing her straitened circumstances, had made no bones about wanting to buy her house.

How Laura might deal with all this — without falling off the wagon — is revealed to her in a chance encounter with a man named Keegan (Brett Goldstein) who tells her, over a shared meal of chips and soft drinks at a beachside snack bar, that he works as a bartender but is a recovering heroin addict. He stays off the smack, he says, by flying kites.

Laura, in the same vein, has to test various approaches to solving the problems to find the solutions. Her path is not an easy one, but when she goes into a neighbourhood bar where she was a regular, the bartender plops her usual in front of her and she doesn’t drink it, there is hope.

Mundruczó acknowledged at a news conference that his latest film is very different from his “White God” that created a stir in Cannes in 2014 with its tale of a pack of dogs that swarms through the streets of Budapest, terrorising residents.

“It’s a rageful movie,” he said of “White God”, while “At the Sea” he said was an internalised movie about a person who is on the brink of transformation.

“I always feel this movie is like, you know, when a butterfly is born, you know, like that movie is just slowly, nothing happening, and then slowly something goes towards some kind of new existence of life, and it’s fragile.”