Tilda Swinton

In The Room Next Door (2024), Tilda Swinton keeps Martha’s voice level and her eyes dry. She asks for what she wants as a favour between adults. We were moved by that plain request, precisely because Swinton does not turn it into a speech. Pedro Almodóvar’s dialogue too often sounds written, including some of hers, but she gives us a reason to stay with an uneven film.

Her film work began with Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986), and she went on to make several films with him. Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) brought wider recognition, with a role that put gender fluidity at the centre. She subsequently moved between independent productions and occasional studio films, with Michael Clayton (2007) among the latter. The more useful way to follow her work is through returning directors, including Joanna Hogg, Wes Anderson and Luca Guadagnino.

Hogg’s films give us the clearest reason to value those repeated collaborations. Swinton plays Rosalind in The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir Part II (2021), then both the mother and her film-maker daughter Julie in The Eternal Daughter (2022). Casting one actor as both women could have been distracting, but the sadness in that empty Welsh hotel matters more than the device. The film is slow and barely frightening, which is worth knowing before settling down for its ghost story.

A smaller part can make good use of her precision, too. In David Fincher’s The Killer (2023), her Expert gets the film’s best-written passage, a long conversation over dinner. We found little beneath the film’s careful craft, but the attention given to her words makes a welcome change from its protagonist reciting his rules.

The risk with Swinton is that the level delivery can harden into a manner and keep us at a distance. We value her most when there is a recognisable need behind it, as there is in Martha’s request, rather than strangeness for its own sake. Start with The Eternal Daughter, if a quiet, sorrowful evening appeals; do not expect the hotel to provide many scares.