You must understand - I'm your master now

 The third in an occasional series of The Human Voice reviews...

We've done the play, we've done the opera, so I thought I'd do the film (or one of them, anyway) - this is the 2020 Almodóvar version starring Tilda Swinton.  Now, no-one would expect anything with those two names involved to be an arty affair now, would they?

And arty it is, but the most striking thing about it is how short it is - it's a mere 30 minutes (the play came in at something like 90 minutes).  Wow, you must be thinking - they must really squeeze the dialogue in to make anything make sense in that period of time.  Well, they REALLY squeeze it in because they don't really get going on the dialogue until 10 minutes in.  And then she spends most of the rest of the time on the phone talking to her ex-lover - and she's not very happy with him.  That's all you need to know really - it has a very dramatic ending though (MUCH more dramatic than I was expecting) and it actually does a good job in tying things up (again, much more so than I was expecting).

Tilda obviously acts it with a capital A and she's got a very expressive face (and timeless - she's 59 in this and you really wouldn't know), but as with the play (or even more so) it's almost impossible to tell what the bloomin' 'eck is going on.  But I actually think it matters less here - it's quite obviously an arty performance piece giving Tilda, Pedro and the set designers a chance to show off and in this regard they most definitely don't disappoint.

The direction is quite interesting because at no point does she look into the camera - she's always looking just out of the frame.  I assume there's some reason for this, but I wouldn't like to speculate (Pedro will quite obviously out-pseud me with the reason).  To be fair to the lad, the whole thing isn't overly arty - it's more just stylish and certainly isn't afraid of using a bit of colour. 

It's an interesting set as well - it seems to be a house built as a theatre set in a massive warehouse but it's not clear whether we're supposed to think it's a house or a set.  Shots also randomly switch between various rooms inside the "house" and outside the "house" but still in the warehouse and her costumes also randomly change for no obvious reason (I'm guessing it's to denote the passing of time, but I can't say it obviously denotes it).  Oh, and she ventures to a shop to buy an axe at one point as well - because we all need an axe, don't we?

All in all, it's a short but sweet thing - competent rather than spectacular, but perfectly watchable with an interesting ending which elevates matters considerably.  Would I recommend you seek it out?  Not in the slightest, but if you stumble across it (which you won't) there are far worse ways you could spend 30 minutes of your time.