97 min | R | December 11, 2020 | Lionsgate
Adrienne survives a car crash, or maybe she does not. The film drops her into a scrambled tour of her own failing relationship and dares her to figure out which memories are real. Sienna Miller and Diego Luna hold it together while the timeline falls apart around them.
Adrienne wakes after a car crash and learns she is dead. Then she learns she is not. The film refuses to settle the question, and that refusal is the point. Adrienne and Matteo are a couple on the edge of separation, and the accident throws them into a fractured tour of their own relationship. Tara Miele builds a film about grief that moves through memory the way grief actually moves. It loops, it skips, and it lands hardest where you do not expect it.
Sienna Miller plays Adrienne as a woman trying to narrate her own death and failing to keep the story straight. She carries the disorientation in her face before the dialogue explains it. Diego Luna plays Matteo with a weary tenderness that never tips into sentiment. He is a man who loves a woman he has stopped knowing how to talk to. The two actors play the same scenes at different ages and different temperatures, and they make the shifts legible without a line of exposition.
Miele writes and directs, and her control of transitions is the strongest tool she has. Scenes bleed into each other so that a hospital corridor becomes a childhood bedroom becomes a beach without a cut announcing the move. The camera follows Adrienne through these doorways as if memory were a single continuous space. The score stays low and unresolved, refusing the swell that would tell the audience how to feel. The surreal staging works best when it stays grounded in the couple’s specific history and least when it reaches for larger statements about the afterlife.
The result is an ambitious film that earns most of its risks and overreaches on a few. The structure asks the audience to assemble the relationship out of order, and the payoff depends on whether the fragments cohere. They mostly do. Miele trusts her two leads to hold the center while the timeline scatters around them, and that trust is rewarded. The film wants to be about how we revise the people we love after we lose them, and it gets close enough to that truth to sting.