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.
