The Tilda Swinton-starring short addresses the isolation of our Covid era, while also revealing cinema’s ability to adapt to it
It is based on a Jean Cocteau play from 1930, but Pedro Almodóvar’s The Human Voice could well be the movie that best captures our bizarre modern times. Being Almodóvar, it does so with consummate elegance, controlled melodrama and enviable home decor, but this one-room, one-person, half-hour piece somehow expresses both our own feelings of domestic isolation and the unstable ground of cinema itself.
The set-up speaks to our lockdown neuroses: Tilda Swinton indoors, alone and increasingly distraught. She is on a phone call with her ex, though we only hear her end of the conversation as she pads about her tasteful apartment wearing AirPods and an array of haute couture outfits. There are cultural trappings galore: her DVDs (Douglas Sirk, Kill Bill), art books, Chanel bags, paintings (De Chirico, Alberto Vargas). Even the axe she buys looks designer.