Review: The Echo Chamber
- VENICE 2026: Andrea Pallaoro’s claustrophobic relationship drama turns emotional dependency into a punishingly inert two-hour chamber piece
Competing at the 83rd Venice Film Festival, The Echo Chamber arrives carrying unusual symbolic weight: it is based on the final screenplay written by Bernardo Bertolucci, together with Ilaria Bernardini and Ludovica Rampoldi. Yet under Andrea Pallaoro’s direction, this story of love, addiction and control remains frustratingly sketchy, its potentially volatile material flattened by an exhausting lack of dramatic momentum.
Luca Marinelli plays Leo, a musician drifting through a cycle of opioid use, attempted recovery and emotional dependence. Around him, Anne (Alicia Vikander) and Ava (Susan Sarandon) occupy a domestic world defined by absence, repetition and unresolved bonds. The film never ventures beyond the house, and even the outside world is reduced to fragments glimpsed through a window: parked cars, occasional passers-by, rain and darkness. What should feel like a pressure cooker instead becomes strangely airless.
Pallaoro observes almost every action in painstaking detail. A shower, a walk from one room to another or a shave can unfold in real time, while conversations and pauses stretch far beyond their dramatic usefulness. The problem is not slowness in itself, but the absence of accumulation. Scene after scene adds little to our understanding of the characters, and their private history is repeatedly invoked without acquiring enough texture to make us care about it. By the halfway point, whether Leo succeeds or fails, or whether he leaves or stays, begins to feel almost inconsequential.
Visually, the pic is restrained without being especially revealing. Diego García’s cinematography keeps the characters boxed into a tight frame, continuing Pallaoro’s preference for constricted aspect ratios after Monica. Here, however, that choice feels even less productive. The narrative is already intensely claustrophobic, built around close proximity, private exchanges and a single, dominant location; squeezing the image further only reinforces a sense of confinement that the movie has already established.
The music, surprisingly for a story centred on a musician, offers little release from this claustrophobia. Clément Ducol’s score and the diegetic musical passages occasionally suggest a more expressive film trying to break through, but Pallaoro repeatedly cuts them short before they can build towards anything resembling a climax. This constant withholding becomes emblematic of the whole project: ideas are introduced, gestures are sketched out, but very little is allowed to develop fully.
The final third makes matters worse. A heavily signposted twist pushes the film towards a more contrived register, and scenes that presumably aim for emotional devastation instead risk turning awkward or even unintentionally comic. That tonal collapse culminates in a finale whose intended weight is undermined by the thinness of what preceded it.
The cast can only do so much to help. Marinelli brings shades of vulnerability and self-destruction to Leo for much of the running time, whilst Vikander and Sarandon lend authority to underwritten roles. But once the screenplay becomes more schematic, even their non-verbal work begins to strain and buckle under the material. The Echo Chamber wants to explore the boundary between care and control, love and dependence, yet never gives those ideas enough dramatic flesh. What remains is a film about emotional entrapment that ends up trapping the viewer, too.
The Echo Chamber was produced by Italy’s Indigo Film together with Rai Cinema and Belgium’s Versus Production. Paradise City Sales handles its international sales.
Photogallery 06/09/2026: Venice 2026 - The Echo Chamber
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© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it
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