Adam’s Sake (L’intérêt d’Adam, 2025) ‘Cinemania’ Movie Review: A Malnourished Attempt at Empathy for the Healthcare System and Its Prisoners

Since their first Palme d’Or win at the turn of the last century with “Rosetta,” the Dardenne brothers have more or less held a total stranglehold over the aesthetic blueprint for social realism in European cinema. Many have tried to emulate the Belgian siblings and their distinctive approach to handheld urgency as a gateway to an empathetic view of society’s various marginalized groups. Still, precious few have managed to evolve that technique into something of their own. Even Jean-Pierre and Luc themselves have occasionally struggled to fully unite their style with a story worthy of its texture.

This legion of imitators isn’t necessarily cause for offence in the eyes of these elder statesmen of 21st-century neorealism, as they have extended their approval as far as directly producing some of the very films that carry their influence. Enter Laura Wandel, whose second feature “Adam’s Sake” comes courtesy of the Dardennes’ production house Les Films du Fleuve, and posits the exact sort of feature the siblings would shepherd—namely, one that nobly co-opts their visual style without a full understanding of what made it such a coveted subject of imitation to begin with.

If nothing else, Wandel has thus far found worthwhile venues for the (failed) extension of the Dardennes’ shaky immediacy, first exploring the covert viciousness of the schoolyard with “Playground” in 2021. Now, with “Adam’s Sake,” Wandel turns her sights towards the ever-condensed hellscape of a chaotic hospital ward.

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Adam’s Sake (L’intérêt d’Adam, 2025) — A still from “Adam’s Sake” (“L’intérêt d’Adam,” 2025)

It’s here that, in typical social realist fashion, we get our hard-cut introduction to Lucy (Léa Drucker), a pediatric ward doctor juggling the usual endless array of patients needing her attention, but one in particular stands out as especially cumbersome. His name is Adam, a four-year-old child admitted for a fractured bone caused by malnutrition. He needs to eat to improve, but he stubbornly refuses to help solve his emaciation for one simple, seemingly unsolvable reason.

Adam’s mother Rebecca (Romanian-born “Happening” star Anamaria Vartolomei), for unknown reasons, is unwilling to feed Adam the sort of nutritious food he needs to strengthen his body, and her refusal to comply with this basic tenet of childcare has extended to the boy’s own attitude on the matter, and has already forced the involvements of the courts to strip her of full custody in the process. In order to get Adam to eat something—anything—substantive, the judge has allowed Rebecca to visit Adam only at feeding time to ensure that he gets his nutrients, but despite every patience offered by Lucy, Rebecca’s steadfast denial of the hospital’s ability to help puts her and her son in increasing physical harm.

Wandel doesn’t simply deserve credit for picking out a novel locale for the application of her handheld sense of immediacy, as “Adam’s Sake” makes pertinent use of the ward’s constricting hallways and compartmentalized sections to wring out a decent sense of anxiety. With each set of doors that pushes open, a new flood of baby screams and concerned parental chatter bursts through the soundscape to overwhelm you with the same sense of exhausting unease with which Lucy and those in her field are met every time they clock in for duty and scan their badges that don’t even work half the time.

Drucker largely carries us through this increasing worry with a mixture of poise and urgency that has always allowed her to excel at portraying professional women stuck between a rock and a hard place. It’s this very disposition in the actress that almost saved this year’s “Case 137” from being a complete waste of efforts from all involved. In “Adam’s Sake,” Drucker once again lets the hardened facade chip away as professionalism can only take one so far in the face of systemic overburdening and individual obstinacy.

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Wandel gives us ample views of the back of Drucker’s head as she forces her way from one underserved patient to the next, but the persistent return to Adam’s dilemma leaves the film feeling rather imbalanced in its attempts to explore the full scope of this situation. Put another way, “Adam’s Sake” would benefit from either substantially more or substantially less focus on the titular quandary, as Wandel’s desire to anchor a wider professional burden within a recurring predicament leaves both ends underserved by an already meager runtime.

The scarcity of the film’s content is only further emphasized by how little Adam and Rebecca’s situation is actually contextualized. We don’t really understand why the mother refuses to feed her son real food—Politics? Religion? RFK Jr.-style brainworm corruption?—and so all we’re left with is an attempt to empathize with a subject without much leeway to extend that empathetic hand. It might be a different story were these characters dropped in on Lucy and her colleagues the same way that they’re dropped in on us, but by this point in the narrative, everyone is well aware of Rebecca’s doggedness, but only one side of the film’s lens is given any needed context as to where it comes from.

Most students of this new school of social realism flunk their final test because they tend to confuse empathy for the subject with ogling pity for their struggle. What “Adam’s Sake” demonstrates is that Laura Wandel is certainly aware of the difference, even if her cumulative efforts themselves demonstrate a difficulty in fully realizing that distinction.