The Echo Chamber
Perhaps the most ridiculous film I’ve seen all year, The Echo Chamber’s only saving grace is the interior design inspiration it provided. The beautiful colour palette of deep reds and warm browns inside our protagonist Leo’s (Luca Marinelli) luxurious apartment is genuinely the best part of this entire production. Unfortunately, the same attention to detail was clearly not extended to the script.
It seems Alicia Vikander, playing the love interest Alice, was given completely different context from the rest of the cast, with her performance – which I can only assume was intended to be warm and human – coming across as almost sinister. No matter how hard Marinelli tried, the romance was impossible to get behind; the entire time, one couldn’t help but wonder whether this was about to become a horror movie. Alice, a medical professional, meets Leo, a musician, while treating his back pain. Her robotic delivery and strange side glances genuinely had me convinced there would be a plot twist revealing that she was lying about her identity or motivations – alas, the actual plot twist was even worse. There was absolutely no chemistry between the two leads, making it rather difficult to care about the relationship upon which the entire film depends. Their interactions were so uncomfortable that I found myself questioning why or if we were even supposed to be rooting for them.
The film’s central conflict revolves around Leo’s struggle with addiction, largely enabled by Alice, and the strain this places on their relationship. Once this is predictably resolved, Alice and Leo reunite as a couple, only for Leo to be forced to rush out of the house following a personal emergency. He gets into his car and speeds out of frame. We hear a loud commotion. Leo has just been in a car crash, and I’m not joking, Imagine Dragons starts playing. Seriously. We spend the remainder of the film watching Alice nurse a now-paralysed Leo. I was actually just incredulous at this point. And then the movie ends. What was presumably intended to be a devastating conclusion instead felt almost comical. The film was so desperate to manufacture some sort of emotional response that it just abandoned any pretence of subtlety. Rather than feeling moved by Leo’s circumstances, I was left completely bewildered by the direction the story had taken.
To give credit where it’s due, Marinelli’s performance was perfectly passable, and particularly strong in the more emotionally charged scenes. Susan Sarandon was, of course, excellent as Ava, a vocalist coming out of retirement to collaborate with Leo. Vikander, whom I am typically a fan of, was so awful that her performance unfortunately contaminated the rest of the film. Admittedly, she was hardly helped by the ludicrous plot and some pretty poor dialogue (and sometimes just lack of dialouge completely). It’s particularly frustrating because the film clearly had the resources and talent to produce something far more compelling. Instead, almost every attempt at sincerity was painfully contrived.
Beautiful apartment, talented cast, very little else worth remembering.
