Adoration (2013)
Directed by Anne Fontaine
No — Adoration is not woke, scoring 19 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Anne Fontaine's first English-language feature concerns two lifelong friends in a New South Wales beach town who, over one summer, begin sleeping with each other's eighteen-year-old sons.
Consciousness Markers
Critics read the film as a 'declaration of feminist independence' about women reclaiming sexual agency and identity after being defined as wives and mothers, though it wears this as melodrama rather than argument.
The film is led by two prominent female stars and directed by Anne Fontaine, but the cast is otherwise uniformly white with no diverse-rentcasting imperative in play.
The film flirts with celebrating the enduring desirability of women in their forties, which nudges toward a body-and-age-positivity gesture, but it is framed as fantasy rather than a bodily-autonomy message.
The film presents its taboo arrangements without a didactic thesis, so any message is diffuse; reviewer commentary that it masquerades as feminist statement is a reading, not an onscreen sermon.
The central relationships are strictly heterosexual — middle-aged women with teenage men — with no queer content whatsoever.
The cast is entirely white and the story makes no reference to race, identity, or racial politics.
The beach-town setting is purely scenic backdrop; no environmental or climate concerns appear in the narrative.
There is no economic critique or class-based commentary; wealth and yacht-building serve as lifestyle texture, not targets.
No character is coded or depicted with neurodivergence or mental-health themes.
The film invents no historical revision; it is a contemporary adaptation of a Doris Lessing novella with no rewriting of real events.
Why it received this score
Anne Fontaine's first English-language feature concerns two lifelong friends in a New South Wales beach town who, over one summer, begin sleeping with each other's eighteen-year-old sons. The arrangement is entered into with a minimum of hand-wringing and sustained, on and off, for the better part of two decades. Naomi Watts and Robin Wright play Lil and Roz with straight faces and excellent cheekbones, and the film asks us to accept that everyone involved is simply happier this way. It is a melodrama of the sunlit, linen-draped variety, and it means it.
Critics were largely unpersuaded. The prevailing reading was that the picture offers a declaration of feminine independence dressed as erotic fantasy, or the reverse. There is something to that. Roz and Lil are defined, at the outset, as wives and mothers, and the affairs function as a reclamation of appetite and identity in the fourth decade of life. The film treats their desirability as a settled fact, which is its own mild gesture toward the notion that women of a certain age need not be retired from the screen or the bedroom. But it arrives as wish fulfillment, not argument. Nobody delivers a thesis. The film is too busy arranging itself around the next charged glance.
Beyond that, the cultural inventory is sparse. The cast is white, the concerns are domestic, and the yacht-building business that eventually employs one of the sons exists to supply boats and a lifestyle, not a critique of capital. The beach is scenery. Race goes unmentioned because it is absent, not because it is suppressed. The screenplay is adapted from a Doris Lessing novella, which lends a literary pedigree the film does not entirely earn. The residue is a well-photographed provocation that mistakes its own taboos for insight, and two actresses doing genuinely interesting work inside a plot that would not survive a moment's scrutiny. It is an enjoyably shallow movie, and the shallowest part is the suggestion that it is anything more.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Lil and Roz are two lifelong friends, having grown up together as neighbors in an idyllic beach town. As adults, their sons have developed a friendship as strong as that which binds their mothers. One summer, all four are confronted by simmering emotions that have been mounting between them, and each find unexpected happiness in relationships that cross the bounds of convention.
Questions about Adoration
Is Adoration woke?
No — Adoration is not woke, scoring 19 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Adoration have any woke elements?
1 of the 10 markers register at 30 or above, led by Feminist Agenda (42). On Feminist Agenda: Critics read the film as a 'declaration of feminist independence' about women reclaiming sexual agency and identity after being defined as wives and mothers, though it wears this as melodrama rather than argument.
How does Adoration compare to other 2013 movies?
It ranks #63 of the 274 films from 2013 we've scored; their average is 14. The wokest is Belle (76).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.