Review: Almodóvar's 30-minute 'Strange Way of Life' is movie passion stripped to its essence

Pedro Almodóvar’s second English-language film, “Strange Way of Life,” is a romantic drama and a Western, both distilled to their essence and concentrated into a 31-minute mini-masterpiece.

(The short film will screen with another Almodóvar short, his 2020 drama “The Human Voice,” a solo showcase for Tilda Swinton that was not screened for critics with the new film. Rounding out the program is a recorded interview with Almodóvar.)

“Strange Way of Life” centers on two characters, a sheriff, Jake (Ethan Hawke), and a cowboy, Silva (Pedro Pascal), who rides into Jake’s town. We pick up, from their responses to each other, that these two have a history — and when they end up in bed together shortly Silva’s arrival, that it’s a complicated and passionate one. The complication, we learn later, is that Jake soon has to arrest Silva’s son, Joe (George Steane), who’s wanted for murder.

Almodóvar also shows us a quick, sexually charged flashback, as the young Silva (José Condessa) and Jake (Jason Fernández), first fell for each other. The scenes, of Jake and Silva then and now, are perfectly composed and white hot — and the actors, particularly Hawke and Pascal, bring out all the intensity of emotion that anyone familiar with Almodóvar’s work would expect to see.

Watching this play out over just 30 minutes doesn’t make a viewer wish Almodóvar had expanded the story to feature length. One can extrapolate what’s unsaid or not shown. It’s like tuning into an old movie on TV in the last half hour — and even if you’ve never seen it, you use the context clues and one’s familiarity with storytelling conventions to fill in the gaps. Almodóvar delivers in “Strange Way of Life” everything the story needs and nothing it doesn’t.

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‘Strange Way of Life’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 6, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some sexual content, language and bloody images. Running time: 31 minutes; will screen with another 30-minute short by director Pedro Almodóvar, “The Human Voice” (2020), and a recorded interview with Almodóvar.