Poignant Road-Trip Drama Takes Rewarding Detours

Like many movies before it, Anima places two strangers together in a car and sets them on a course fueled by mutual dependence, disconnection and bottled-up emotion. It’s as tried-and-true a story template as you can find, and one that writer-director Brian Tetsuro Ivie gently twists, to magnificent low-key effect, with a dash of icy sci-fi and a soulful retro yearning.

Indispensable indie actors Maria Dizzia and Lili Taylor, filmmaker Tom McCarthy and Marin Ireland all contribute well-etched supporting turns, but essentially this is a two-hander, with Takehiro Hira (Shogun) and Sydney Chandler (Alien: Earth) superbly unsentimental as unlikely travel partners: a dying man and the person hired to deliver him to his final appointment. Set about five minutes in the future, Anima revolves around the possibilities of virtual reality and is, at its essence, a story of more age-old concerns — namely, the parent-child bond and the transcendent power of music. As its central duo move through New England towns, it’s also a movie whose eye for architecture recalls Kogonada’s Columbus.

Chandler plays Beck, who lives in a tiny New York apartment and has just been laid off from her job at a company that makes robot pets. Her résumé draws the interest of Anima Technologies (whose headquarters are played by a striking 21st-century building on the Bard College campus). The pricey product Anima sells is a cloud-based version of the dearly departed that preserves “the deepest part” of clients’ identities after their physical death. The exec (Ireland) who hires Beck assures her that what they’re offering is no mere algorithm or chatbot, though she herself sure sounds like one.

For reasons that have a screenwriterly symmetry but not an on-the-nose obviousness, Beck has been matched with Paul (Hira), an important (read: deep-pocketed) client. The company doesn’t want to risk the chance that he’ll back out of his scheduled “asset transfer,” and the assignment Beck can’t afford to turn down is to drive him from his home to Anima for the procedure. As to the efficacy of Anima’s offering, she’s a skeptic, while her mother, Jo (Dizzia), a recently widowed device-averse bohemian, refers to the company as “death capitalists.”

Whether or not his waterfront home is on an actual island, Paul is an emotionally isolated soul. Beck’s mission is to get him to Anima ASAP, but he has a plan for the trip that includes a few stops, and he insists they go in his vintage Nissan, a fitting choice for a man who made his fortune as a manufacturer of buttons, that most analog of commodities.

Between his boss-level standoffish and her Gen Z stare, they begin at an impasse. Their road trip takes them south through Connecticut on the I-95, the camerawork of Matheus Bastos attuned to the rich greens of the woodsy Northeast setting and an evocative assortment of locations, among them an auto shop in New Haven, a themed motel and, in a sequence edged with comic absurdity, the secluded home of a garrulous former employee (McCarthy) and his wife (Aya Ibaraki).

An angsty appreciation for indie pop culture of a ’90s vintage courses through the movie, with crucial references to Twin Peaks and the bands Morphine and Sparklehorse. It’s at a used record shop (real-life Connecticut store Merle’s Record Rack) that the screenplay first cues up a pointed mention of Morphine’s song “In Spite of Me,” which will turn up later in a showstopper of a scene that transforms lyrics into a form of dialogue and melody into balm. The charged mix of deadpan detachment and naked ache in Chandler and Hira’s faces proves an eloquent match for a killer song.

Music is essential to who Beck is, but also something she’s pushed aside, having seen how all-consuming it was for her late father, a touring musician who put his art first. When Paul pays her a small fortune to attend a club concert with him, she doesn’t know it’s because he’s looking for the teenage son he’s never met. Against the lo-fi electronica of Yummy Bear (a version of Montell Fish’s DJ Gummy Bear), the evening turns disastrous, but something breaks open between Beck and Paul.

The story’s emotional colors deepen when they locate Paul’s son, Ryan, played to vulnerable, resilient perfection by Maximilian Lee Piazza. He’s a lonely kid working in a pet store that specializes in birds of the virtual rather than the flesh-and-blood variety, adding another facet to the movie’s theme of death-defying connection. For Ryan’s mother, Julia (Taylor), Paul’s surprise visit unleashes a wary bitterness she’s long kept contained.

Working from a story he wrote with Brev Moss, Tetsuro Ivie infuses familiar movie tropes with fresh angles and involving energy. The editing, by the director and Sam Kuhn, finds the pulse of every scene, and the music, fittingly, is a vital element, from the dream-state propulsion of Montell Fish’s compositions to a fine selection of vintage Japanese folk-rock. Production designer Katie Rose Balun’s expressive work includes kitschy motel interiors, jam-packed stores and, crucially, the contrast between the artistic vibes of Jo’s colorful house and the cool, antiseptic geometry of Anima’s offices.

Aspects of Beck and Jo’s story could be clearer, although the vagueness works, to an extent, as a reflection of how Beck has pushed aside her grief over her father, and how raw the wounds still are. As Paul’s pain, both physical and emotional, becomes more apparent, she finds her bedside manner, gallows humor notwithstanding. Anima grows more lucent and powerful as it proceeds and as its characters, who have shut down to protect themselves, discover an immortality that money can’t buy.