CINEMANIA 2025: Adam’s Sake | Interview with Laura Wandel

Read this article in French.

The second feature by Belgian filmmaker Laura Wandel feels like a confirmation — a few years after Playground, which also began its journey in Cannes. Opening the 2025 Critics’ Week, Adam’s Sake offers a gripping, immersive experience set in a public hospital, where a head nurse, portrayed by the formidable Léa Drucker, pushes the limits of what the institution and its means allow her to accomplish. She faces a young mother in distress, played by Anamaria Vartolomei, whose four-year-old son, Adam, is in danger. Without realizing it, the mother has been endangering her child by keeping him in a state of undernourishment.

While hospital protocols demand that Lucy, the nurse, act with firmness to save the child, her conscience and humanity compel her to show affection and understanding toward the struggling mother.

“As in my previous film, I explore the difficulty we have communicating with one another, and the gradual loss of empathy,” explains Laura Wandel. Within the cold, impersonal walls of the hospital, the young mother’s ordeal stirs the compassion of Léa Drucker’s character, who is expected to stick to a strictly pragmatic approach. “We tend to judge others very quickly, but I believe that often comes from a lack of time. It’s something that deeply affects me about our era — and worries me a lot,” the filmmaker confides.

To make the relationship between the two women as realistic as possible while faithfully portraying the impoverished state of the public healthcare system, Laura Wandel spent several weeks immersed in a Belgian hospital, observing medical staff at work. What she discovered was striking: “The paradox lies in the fact that this is a profession meant to care for others, yet, due to lack of time and resources, it sometimes ends up doing the opposite.” From that observation, she shaped Lucy’s journey — a nurse who decides to defy the rules out of simple humanity toward her patient. “For her, that day is a way of saying stop — of putting the human back at the center of a system that no longer works,” Wandel explains.

This moral dilemma runs through Lucy’s character, as she faces Adam’s mother—reluctant to entrust her child to the caretakers, convinced that only she can truly protect him. “We’re not used to seeing this kind of character, and it was important that the audience first and foremost feel her fragility,” notes the director, who refrains from passing any judgment on the mother — portrayed with heartbreaking precision by Anamaria Vartolomei.

Before Wandel’s camera, Léa Drucker and Anamaria Vartolomei deliver deeply authentic performances, both clinically restrained and profoundly moving. Counterintuitively, the filmmaker explains that the key was not endless rehearsals before shooting, but rather immersing the actresses in the specific energy of a hospital environment — especially Drucker. “We spent an entire day together in the hospital where I had done my research. Léa asked countless questions, observed, and tried to understand,” recalls Wandel. She sums it up simply: “It’s a lot of observation and documentation work.”

To enrich Anamaria Vartolomei’s performance, Wandel also suggested two films for reference: Hungry Hearts by Saverio Costanzo and Ladybird by Ken Loach, both exploring the mother-child relationship.

Vartolomei’s preparation also involved building a real and believable bond with the young actor playing Adam. “With Anamaria, we worked on the relationship with the child, not by rehearsing scenes, but by going to the park, the pool — so that there was a natural closeness between them,” explains Wandel.

The director deliberately chose to have her actresses absorb the hospital environment and the mother-son relationship without delving too deeply into precise psychology: “I didn’t want to add too many psychological details or backstory. I intentionally kept the characters’ backgrounds a bit vague because I found it interesting that they themselves seemed somewhat lost in the situation.” She adds on the preparatory work: “In the end, we didn’t really rehearse the scenes themselves; we focused on everything surrounding them. On set, we did many takes to push a little further each time.”

The film is also defined by its constant sense of tension, an overwhelming atmosphere of chaos enveloping the characters. The exhausting hospital environment, for both staff and patients, is rendered notably through sound. “There’s no music in the film, but we created a real soundtrack from hospital noises, structured almost like a musical score.” These sounds, she notes, “also reflect a certain institutional violence that affects both caregivers and patients.” The sound design, compiled from recordings in multiple hospitals, took “several months to find the most accurate sounds possible,” all while keeping in mind that “the challenge was not to overwhelm the viewer’s ears. We had to strike the right balance between conveying oppression and, at times, giving a bit of breathing space.”

Like the sound design, the film is built as a taut line, with tension steadily mounting. It’s a demanding structure that relies above all on careful balance: “It’s a very difficult equilibrium to find. That’s why the writing took so long — sometimes I wanted to add elements that ended up weighing things down or explaining too much.” On editing, she adds, “I didn’t expect the film to be this short or this tense. Working with editor Nicolas Rumpl, we felt that the pacing was just right — even one or two extra seconds in certain sequences would let everything collapse. It’s truly meticulous work at every stage.”

Ultimately, Adam’s Sake is a gripping, visceral, and deeply human film. Wandel also sees it as “a tribute to all healthcare workers,” moved as she was by what she witnessed and determined to capture the truest reality, both in gestures and situations.

Finally, when asked what drives her to create, she answers: “The most important thing for me is that the audience can identify with the characters, that they feel empathy. That’s what made me want to make films as a teenager — that moment when you forget your own life to step into someone else’s. To me, that’s the most beautiful thing cinema can offer.”