Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Stars: Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola

Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s ‘What Are You Going Through’, Almodóvar’s first feature length English language film is an immaculately orchestrated, sensitively played and clearheaded study of friendship, mortality and fate.

Moore is Ingrid, a best-selling novelist. She discovers by chance, during a book signing, that her old friend Martha (Swinton), a war journalist, has cancer. Ingrid goes to see Martha in hospital who informs her in a surprisingly unemotive and direct manner that she has stage three cervical cancer and is deliberating whether to undergo a new experimental treatment, or refuse it and let go. They relocate to a fancy country house in upstate New York where the friends talk over their feelings and Martha makes a bold request of her friend.

This may be Almodóvar’s somberest film to date with an unsettling noirish tone pervading throughout, bolstered by Alberto Iglesias’s moody score, and a wintry colour scheme from cinematographer Eduard Grau. Swinton’s occasionally boldly coloured outfits, courtesy of designer Bina ‘Tár’ Daigeler, provide some life-affirming relief.

As befits a celebrated ‘woman’s director’, Moore and Swinton turn in reliably nuanced performances, but there are great turns from the male players too with John Turturro’s passionate environmentalist and novelist who has history with both of the women, and Allesandro Nivola as a gruff cop.

David Willoughby

Follow David on Twitter @DWill_Crackfilm