Wander Darkly: Sienna Miller and Diego Luna in a near-death experience, and an emotional journey without a false note

By Karen Gordon

Rating: A minus

Life, death, grief… writer/director Tara Miele tackles the big subjects in her intimate, ambitious film Wander Darkly.

The movie begins in a fairly straightforward way: Sienna Miller and Diego Luna play Adrienne and Matteo.  They’ve just had a baby, and while they share that radiant bubble of love for their child, there are fractures in the relationship. Adrienne is fed up and embittered, and Matteo tries to placate her, but seems to have lost her trust and can’t get it back. 

Diego Luna and Sienna Miller are a young couple forever changed by a near death experience.

Then one night on their way home from a party, they’re in a bad car accident. Adrienne moves in and out of consciousness, first on the road, and then in the emergency ward at the hospital. She’s shocked and having problems discerning what’s real and what isn’t. She starts to believe that she’s died in the car accident, and no amount of reassurance from Matteo can convince her otherwise.   

She’s trying to sort out what’s really going on, and the movie starts to slide around in time, as she and Matteo revisit points in their relationship when the bond was strong, and then when it started to fall apart. They’re not reliving the experiences, but rather seeing them again from the perspective of everything that happened to them up until the accident - analyzing them together, what they saw, what they felt, what they perceived. 

Because we’re seeing it through her eyes, the question of whether she has died, or is hovering between life and death is woven through Wander Darkly. But as we’re moving with her through time, our focus is less what is currently happening to Adrienne.  Instead Miele draws our attention to the dynamics of a relationship and, through that, to pondering much bigger questions.

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The shifting timeline is one way she has of dislocating us from the ordinary. It’s also impossible at times to know whether we’re living in Adrienne’s mind, as she’s stuck between worlds, or whether she’s just in shock and having trouble perceiving things correctly in real time. 

 It’s a complicated and risky way to structure a movie, but Miele, keeps a firm control on her story. Piece by piece, she gives us what we need to understand the fracture points in the relationship, how each reacted and where that took them individually, and as a couple. 

None of this would work without the stellar cast.  Miller and Luna are superb, traversing a range of emotional material without a false note.  It’s their anger, their confusion, and their love that breathes life into the movie. 

For sure, we care about Adrienne and Matteo and what’s happening to them.  But Miele’s storytelling style takes things much deeper. 

The net result is a film that talks about more than just an ordinary couple’s relationship issues. Miele, who based Wander Darkly on where her thoughts took her after she and her husband recovered from a bad car accident, is asking big questions here: about the fragility of life, the complexities and bonds of love, and the inevitability of grief. 

Life, like love is messy. The beauty of the film is the way Miele, through the dilemma of Adrienne and Matteo, asks us to look at our own messy lives and see it through fresh eyes. 

Wander Darkly. Written and directed by Tara Miele. Starring Sienna Miller and Diego Luna. Debuts in select theatres and on demand on Friday, December 11.