Taken together, Almodóvar’s last three films—Pain and Glory, Parallel Mothers, and now The Room Next Door—solve one another, forming a sort of triptych about what it means to make art at the end of a life. Each asks what we leave behind in the world, what lasts, what remains, and together they form an almost scandalously hopeful answer: art is enough, and equal to love, and no different from it.
JoinedNovember 29, 2018
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Helena Fitzgerald's writing has appeared in Bookforum, The Atlantic, Wired, Hazlitt, The New Republic, Elle, Nylon, GQ, Rolling Stone, Airmail, The Cut, and The New Inquiry, among others. Previously, she also wrote “Griefbacon,” a newsletter examining romantic love in various forms. She lives in Manhattan and is currently at work on a novel about the internet at the turn of the century, and an essay collection about love and humiliation.
The Banshees of Inisherin had broken my heart, but made me laugh so much that I’d missed my own heartbreak occurring; I’d enjoyed the movie too much to spot the knives gleaming beneath its surface.
Both visually and textually, Cries and Whispers is concerned with exteriors and interiors, with surfaces and what seethes beneath them.



