A Pedro Almodóvar film in English? The combination just sounds wrong, like wandering down Madrid’s Cava Baja and trying to find somewhere that serves cod and chips. Nevertheless, the Spanish master has recently been dabbling: two English-language shorts, 2020’s The Human Voice and 2023’s Strange Way of Life, enjoyed extensive play on the festival circuit. And at Venice this year, he makes his anglophone feature debut.
The result – an adaptation of the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez – is depressingly thin, and not only for linguistic reasons. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton star as two old friends who reconnect after Moore’s Ingrid, a successful author, hears that Swinton’s Martha, a former war correspondent, has third-stage cervical cancer, and is not long for this world.
She’s being tended to in a Manhattan hospital: a very Almodóvarian one, where the patients wear immaculate colour-blocked gowns. But over coffee one day, she confides that she has illegally obtained a euthanasia pill – and plans, at a time of her choosing, to end her own life. Ingrid, she hopes, will accompany her to a cubist bungalow in a forest near Woodstock, to be close at hand – in the room next door, specifically – while the deed is carried out.
