‘The Echo Chamber’ Review: Luca Marinelli and Alicia Vikander Are Sublime in a Brooding Addiction Romance Directed from Bertolucci’s Last Script

Good in bed, bad at intimacy. In “The Echo Chamber,” an extraordinary Luca Marinelli plays the sort of guy for whom emotional closeness is a death sentence, the kind of guy who tells you he has “trouble sleeping next to other people” after he fucks your lights out, the devastatingly handsome one you’re ready to blow up your life and empty your bank account for after one night. A music producer living in the tony Eaton Place neighborhood of London, Leo is also a drug addict enmeshed in the codependent, unrequited care of medical doctor Anne (Alicia Vikander).

“The Echo Chamber,” the vividly downbeat fourth feature from Italian writer/director Andrea Pallaoro (“Hannah,” “Monica”), adapts Bernardo Bertolucci’s final screenplay before he died, and the Oscar-winning grandmaster’s ghost is all over this movie, from its melodramatic excesses to its kinky-depressed onscreen sexuality. Set entirely within one flat, it also summons to mind Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider languishing inside the crumbling architecture of “Last Tango in Paris,” though Leo’s multi-room apartment is much posher, with everything down to the sweaters swaddled in elegance. Misery never looked better.

Marinelli, who has the most mesmerically beautiful blue eyes on God’s Earth, continues his ascension as one of his home country’s finest actors, having already displayed his aptitude for masculine melancholy in films including “Martin Eden” and “The Eight Mountains.” Any movie that opens with electropop DJ Jamie xx’s escalatingly anthemic EDM track “Gosh” from 2015 has my heart, but “The Echo Chamber” soundtracks that thumping song to Leo’s offscreen overdose after a night of boozing and snorting crushed-up pain pills. The screenplay, co-written with Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi, then swivels backward in time to peel back how we got here: A seemingly lifelong back injury led Leo to the handcraft of osteopathic physician Anne, with whom he kindles an immediate attraction. And that’s before he reveals that he is, in fact, no good at intimacy at all. There is something off about her aspect, though — insecure, but also watchful and manipulative — that allows you to buy why she keeps hanging around him in the first place.

In the present day, an 87-days-sober, post-rehab Leo is also putting the finishing touches on a longtime collaboration with singer/songerwriter Ava — played by a glamorously dégagé and smoky-eyed Susan Sarandon. A once-popular ’80s singer whose voice has dissipated with overuse but whose passion for songcraft hasn’t flickered, she has Joni Mitchell’s cigarette habit with Marianne Faithfull’s tendency to sing-speak melodies. Sarandon’s role feels like the only element of “The Echo Chamber” that’s out in space, especially as her songstressing feels a little bit closer to karaoke than stage-commanding. She does, however, prove a crucial bridge to emotions in the film‘s twilight stretch into deus ex melodrama.

Vikander tends to get washed out in mismatched ensembles these days (“Hope,” “Rumours,” “The Wizard of the Kremlin”). But Pallaoro, who with cinematographer Diego García photographs his actors wonderfully, blesses the Oscar winner with her plummiest role since Olivier Assayas’ TV adaptation of his own feature “Irma Vep.”

The Bertolucci presence in the script is especially felt in how much of a voyeur Anne becomes, breaking into the now-sober Leo’s apartment, watching him sleep, and leaving tacit missives behind to make him perhaps aware that she is there. Like when he gloomily masturbates with his face buried in a scarf she gifted him to huff off her smell. There are times, though, when the staticness of the camera becomes a liability: Can we not meet these people on the level that they are at, which is raw and messy? The pained remove that we observe everyone from is almost too exquisite, with emotions kept in a jar that’s been put on ice.

“The Echo Chamber” is ultimately a story of codependency and control and how those impulses bleed into one another, as in flashbacks about the burgeoning of their relationship, Anne keeps bringing Leo opioids to keep him in her orbit. Here is a woman willing to debase herself to keep around a man who doesn’t care if she lives or dies — until, of course, he does, as the film veers into a tragedy that binds them inextricably and inescapably together.

Pallaoro’s piercingly moving study of addiction spirals into operatic exaggeration and blazing unsubtlety, but that shift never feels dishonest or betraying of the story he’s trying to tell. With the spirit of the lost 1990s arthouse, this is a mesmerizingly sad and sexy film anchored by what should go down as the best performance of Marinelli’s career. And it’s moody and even deliciously perverse enough in that Euro-chic arthouse way to somehow make it a highlight of Bertolucci’s, too.

Grade: B+

“The Echo Chamber” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.