The Echo Chamber, 2026.
Directed by Andrea Pallaoro.
Starring Luca Marinelli, Alicia Vikander, Susan Sarandon, Ann Akinjirin, Peter Coonan, Antonia Fotaras, and Aomi Muyock.
SYNOPSIS:
A love story where the boundaries between presence and absence, care and dependence, desire and control blur until they dissolve.
There isn’t much heat or logic in director Andrea Pallaoro’s romantic drama The Echo Chamber, which is everything from painfully dull at times (there is slow cinema, and then there is this film, which drops the title card 20+ minutes in when not much has even happened) to nonsensical, given it’s about a visiting nurse who kind of simply falls for her patient because he is an attractive music producer. Credit for sexual tension whenever she injects pain medication into his rear end, I suppose.
The fact that something so aggressively tedious and mediocre attracted star power such as Alicia Vikander as nurse Anne and Susan Sarandon as an over-the-hill singer-songwriter that Leo (Luca Marinelli) has coaxed out of retirement to record one last album can only be ascribed to the story coming from deceased legend Bernardo Bertolucci’s final screenplay, which here has also been reworked by Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi. That’s the only explanation, as what unfolds is a fairly generic look at an artist in both emotional and physical pain who becomes addicted to drugs.
There isn’t much to the romance between Leo and Anne, other than her insistence on never leaving his side, no matter what happens. And man oh man, that sentiment is tested. Where The Echo Chamber goes in its final 20 minutes is convoluted and confounding, a real “but why is the narrative even going in this direction” moment that undercuts whether one can buy into the demonstrated unwavering love or not, and that accounting for how convincing Luca Marinelli, who is fine throughout, sells the physical side of it.
One also has to admit that the final scene is nonetheless bold on Alicia Vikander’s part. There is a chance some of it could have amounted to a provocative reaction of the film had actually deftly handled its themes of toxic love and drug addiction, which the actual nurse is somewhat complicit in. Also, never in a million years could anyone guess the rock band on a nearby jukebox bleeding into the scene.
In an attempt to flush out some of Leo’s world, there are also some supporting players in the form of relatives and a new born nephew, none of which is meaningfully woven into the fabric of the story being told. None of the actors are necessarily embarrassing themselves, as The Echo Chamber is competently acted, with some decent songs performed by Susan Sarandon herself, but it’s all in service of something that never transcends its clichéd blandness and punishing pace.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder
