‘The Echo Chamber’ Review: Alicia Vikander and Susan Sarandon Star

In The Echo Chamber, Rome plays London — sorta kinda. The movie’s sole location is a massive high-ceilinged apartment in the poshest section of the British capital, but it stubbornly reads as more Old World Continental than Belgravia. That’s no knock against the richly layered production design, which is as essential to the story as the trio of superb actors who breathe life into the studied tableaux. The disconnect between where we are and where we’re supposed to be makes sense: In the world of director Andrea Pallaoro’s film, this sprawling flat, the home of a successful music producer, is a liminal space, an in-between, a place of mystery, deception, longing and dislocation.

The characters, played by Alicia Vikander, Luca Marinelli and Susan Sarandon, crisscross the huge rooms, together and separately, the layers of the story sometimes overlapping, sometimes discrete. There’s a muted curatorial power to the apartment’s collection of stuff, the dialogue has a stripped-down poetic quality, and the story’s shifts back and forth in time are subtle and disorienting. Beginning its theatrical run Sept. 10 in Italy, this Golden Lion contender is a capital-A art house movie, steeped in a dark emo sensibility, the kind of movie where you might at times wish for more sunlight, or that the longueurs were, well, shorter. It’s the kind of movie you either resist or surrender to. I found the latter approach rewarding: The characters and their relationships grow more absorbing as the story proceeds, and late-arriving twists that might have been mawkish in other hands prove haunting and affecting.

Working for the first time from a screenplay he didn’t write (his three previous features, Medeas, Hannah and Monica, were collaborations with Orlando Tirado), Pallaoro has based his new film on a script by Bernardo Bertolucci, Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi, which was still in its second draft when Bertolucci died in 2018. Pallaoro developed The Echo Chamber with the late maestro’s collaborators, crafting an intimate drama that maintains his established aversion to conventional narrative explanation as it explores questions of art and time, distance and nearness, love and manipulation.

Marinelli (Martin Eden, The Old Guard, M. Son of the Century) plays Leo, first seen in the throes of a coke-fueled communion with electronica, dancing around his apartment and drawing his tentative girlfriend, Anne (Vikander), into his ecstatic mood. Later, she wakes in the quiet but Leo doesn’t. After an ambulance takes him away, the action jumps ahead to his return from rehab. Anne is seen in the apartment too, but rarely when Leo is there, the sense of a shared space taking on an almost ghostly aura.

Leo’s friends Victoria (Ann Akinjirin) and Alma (Aomi Muyock) visit with their infant boy, and Edward (Peter Coonan), his recovery sponsor, makes an appearance late in the story. But otherwise the interactions revolve entirely around the central trio, separately and in pairs.

Sarandon’s Ava May stops by, not quite convinced she wants to pick up the pieces of “this insane project of yours” — her first album in many years, with Leo at the helm. Luring her out of retirement was a longtime dream of the producer’s, but now, in the sensitive early weeks of his recovery, the responsibility is a weighty load. A smoky-voiced rock chanteuse à la Marianne Faithfull or Nico, she’s a straight-talking grande dame who quotes Henry James, has a strong sense of who she is and also, beneath the hard-won sangfroid, a bone-deep loneliness after the end of a longtime romantic relationship, and a terror of looking foolish. The expression on her face when Leo plays one of her old records says more than any dialogue could.

It’s a terrific role for Sarandon, whose screen career kicked off 51 years ago with the landmark musical Rocky Horror, and whose singing here, on a handful of original songs by Clément Ducol and Émilie Gassin, has a lovely, unforced sense of broody introspection and yearning. The scenes between her and Marinelli are charged with vulnerability, each character balancing honesty and self-protection, both actors conveying whole lifetimes through the most nuanced shifts in body language and gaze.

After the movie’s title card appears, at the 23-minute mark, Pallaoro rewinds to Leo and Anne’s first meeting. She’s a physiotherapist making a house call; he’s a patient with chronic back pain. Holding steady on Marinelli’s expressive face, Diego García’s camera pinpoints the moment when Leo falls for Anne. They become lovers, albeit with intimacy issues: At night, he finds it difficult to sleep beside anyone, and in the daytime, when he’s away in the studio, she slinks through the apartment’s ample shadows like an intruder, smoking the butts he left in an ashtray, eating his last slice of chocolate cake, breathing in his scent from a pillow. She blow-dries the damp towel that’s evidence of the shower she’s taken; she slips out before the arriving housekeeper sees her; and, at one point, she hides in a corner while Leo and Ava May talk.

As the most inscrutable of the story’s characters, Vikander strikes an unsettling nerve between openness and stealth. There’s a rootlessness about Anne — she describes her apartment as a space devoid of objects — and an ever-shifting riddle, as the timeline zigs and zags, of whether she feels she’s a part of Leo’s life or an outsider looking in. His feelings for her are indelibly entangled with her role as the person helping to manage his physical pain. Massages and injections give way to carefully doled out pills, until he goes farther afield to get what he needs.

As the drama unfolds, its pivotal ambiguity concerns the blurred line between affection and exploitation: the lies and deceptions of the addicted person and, crucially, the neediness of the caretaker. Leo repeatedly refers to Anne as an angel, and by the time, late in the proceedings, that Ava May comments, “I don’t know if I like angels,” you’re likely to agree.

Which is not to say that Vikander and Pallaoro have created a villain; beneath the tangled layers of compulsion, Anne is never simply hissable. The self-image she clings to is that of one who mends, however intrusively: She goes through Leo’s garbage to retrieve pieces of a shattered ceramic mug that she will, naturally, put back together using the Japanese art of kintsugi.

The potency and truthfulness of art permeate the drama as a kind of clarity, standing stronger than sexual passion against all the tangled webs of dependency. That clarity is evident in Leo’s love of his work, and the breakthrough creative moments that he and Ava May share. It animates Gaspare De Pascali’s handsome production design, whose palette of rich ochres and deep wintry colors is mirrored in the unobtrusive costumes by Antonella Cannarozzi. DP García (Causeway, Wildlife) frames the textured layers of fabric, glass and reflections with precision, casting the drama’s circumscribed universe in a burnished light.

With its long, often wordless takes — the editing is by Pallaoro’s regular collaborator Paola Freddi — and stygian atmosphere, the movie’s sensibility can feel oppressive. But as the characters gradually reveal themselves, sometimes by hiding, it’s clear that this visual language is attuned to the elegance of the performances and the story’s elemental ache.

In its closing stretch, The Echo Chamber lurches toward a dark melodramatic turn. Having explored matters of pain and comfort, stillness and busyness, the movie asks, finally, whom a tragedy belongs to. A scene of devastating intimacy unfolds, its desperation unbearable, its emotion reverberating like a well-crafted song.