Passages review – Ira Sachs excels with thorny love triangle drama

After his Cannes misfire Frankie in 2021, writer-director Ira Sachs has made a compelling return to form at Sundance with his cruelly well-observed drama Passages. It’s a bit of a bland title and one that never really pays off but its subject matter is far more compelling, a messy little movie about a specifically awful brand of narcissist who will be frighteningly familiar to many of us who have known him and even more so to those who might well be him.

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Transit’s Franz Rogowski plays self-obsessed film director Tomas, married to artist Martin (Ben Whishaw), but forever curious for more. That more arrives in the shape of Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), a teacher he meets at a bar before finding himself in her bedroom. He’s brazenly proud when recounting the tale back at home but when lust turns to love, or at least his concept of it, whatever conflicted openness Martin might have previously had soon curdles into distaste.

Sachs has previously shown a canny knack for recognising the often uncomfortable subtleties of relationships, most convincingly in his lovely yet grounded tale of elder gay commitment Love is Strange and the humane family drama Little Men. This is a far darker tale, a damning look at the pain certain people can inflict on others while they’re too busy focused on their own wants. Rogowki’s Tomas has a bit of Reynolds Woodcock about him, the petulant and particular dress-maker from Phantom Thread, obsessed with his own work and reckless with his lovers. He flits between Martin and Agathe, wheedling his way into whichever bed is the warmest that night, cleverly picking partners who are more passive in their acceptance of his noxious behaviour (a scene where Agathe’s mother confronts him is of great satisfaction).

There are vague shades of The Souvenir, which offered a similarly uneasy form of voyeurism, watching smart people make stupid relationship decisions that can be easily judged with distance by some but horribly easy to empathise with for those who have been closer to such toxicity. Sachs is a delicate writer and his script, co-written by author and longtime collaborator Mauricio Zacharias is initially vague on detail, in ways that do and don’t work. But his trust in both his writing and then his audience pays off with an increasingly devastating cycle of bruised hearts, a slow trail of wreckage that becomes impossible not to become involved in, no matter how hard one might sigh.

It’s an eye-openingly explicit film, with one gay sex scene that is the most unfettered I have seen in relatively mainstream cinema for a long time, but otherwise emotionally restrained, denying us the more obvious scenes of conflict we might expect from such territory. Rogowski makes for a believably odious yet charming cad while Whishaw and Exarchopoulos neatly underplay their heartbreak, subtly showing the toll of putting up with someone who mistreats you and then putting up with yourself for allowing it.

In his pre-premiere introduction, Sachs spoke about being inspired during the pandemic to create a film about intimacy but his film makes a convincing case for staying alone, a slight yet scarring study of romantic chaos.

• Passages premiered at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution