123 min | R | December 24, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
Two single women meet in a maternity ward and give birth on the same day. Their lives knot together in ways neither chooses. Almodovar uses the accident of motherhood to dig up the bodies Spain refuses to bury.
Janis is a successful photographer in her forties who gets pregnant by a married man and decides to keep the baby alone. Ana is a teenager terrified of the child she carries. They share a hospital room and deliver their daughters on the same day. The film tracks what happens after the two women leave the ward and how a single hospital error binds them across the years that follow. Running underneath the domestic drama is Spain itself, where Janis works to exhume her great-grandfather from a mass grave left by the Civil War.
Penelope Cruz plays Janis as a woman who acts first and reckons later. She makes a terrible decision early and then carries the weight of it in her face for the rest of the film. Cruz never plays the guilt as melodrama. She plays it as a low constant hum that she has learned to function around. Milena Smit plays Ana with the rawness of someone too young for what she is handed, and the friendship the two build curdles into something more complicated. Rossy de Palma turns a small role as Janis’s editor Elena into a study of blunt loyalty.
Pedro Almodovar writes and directs with the control of a filmmaker who no longer needs to prove anything. The production design saturates every frame in his signature reds and greens, and he stages domestic scenes against kitchens and apartments that look composed down to the coffee cups. Alberto Iglesias scores the film with a tension that treats the soap-opera plotting as a thriller, which is exactly what it is. Almodovar braids two stories that should not fit together. A baby mix-up and a national grave. He insists they are the same story about who gets to know the truth of their own origins.
This is late Almodovar working at the height of his craft. The melodrama is deliberate and the politics are not decoration. The exhumation that bookends the film is the point the whole structure has been building toward. Spain buried its dead and agreed not to look, and Almodovar argues that a country which cannot face its own graves cannot raise honest children. He makes that argument through one woman holding one secret, and it lands.