At The Movies: Wordless animation Flow speaks volumes, The Room Next Door a thin melodrama

Flow (G)

85 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on Dec 5
★★★★☆

The story: In the wake of a devastating flood, a cat finds refuge with motley stranded animals on a tattered sailboat. This animated adventure is Latvia’s submission for the 2025 Best International Feature Film Oscar and a winner of the Jury Award and Audience Award at the medium’s pre-eminent event, the Annecy International Animation Film Festival.

Flow was fully created using the open-source computer software Blender.

And yet, Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis’ (Away, 2019) visuals are breathtaking in their naturalism.

The cross-species voyagers – the solitary cat, an industrious lemur, an injured secretary bird, a capybara and a playful labrador retriever – are expressive personalities that look and move as they are, and communicate in mews and growls. There is not a single line of dialogue in a soundscape further enriched by the winds and waves.

The uncertain journey viewed through the cat’s perspective has lively character humour as well as thrills and spills – literally, what with the feline hero often falling overboard and nearly drowning.

It is captivating kids’ entertainment without the childishness of Hollywood animation that, at the same time, invites adults to contemplate the eerie, abandoned architecture in ruins. Where have the humans gone?

Natural enemies, the members of the menagerie learn trust as they navigate the submerged post-apocalyptic world together in search of dry land. The lesson of teamwork is familiar. It is affecting nonetheless because of Zilbalodis’ artistry.

The writer-director-editor, who also composed the score, has reimagined the Noah’s Ark narrative for the current climate end-days. He holds out hope that mankind’s extinction in the biblical deluge may bring a new beginning for the co-existence of the surviving creatures.

Hot take: There are no words for this extraordinary eco parable.

The Room Next Door (M18)

107 minutes, opens on Dec 5
★★★☆☆

The story: Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar’s English-language feature debut scooped the Golden Lion top honour at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It co-stars Tilda Swinton as American journalist Martha and Julianne Moore as her old friend Ingrid, who reconnects with Martha during her final days of cancer.

Martha is dying in The Room Next Door, and she will do so in the high style of Almodovar.

She relocates from her designer Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City to a designer rental home upstate, where she plans to take an illicit “suicide pill” at a moment of her choosing with the succour of Ingrid in the next room, literally and figuratively.

Over the fateful weekend, the once-close pair – they worked at the same magazine decades earlier – rekindle their bond by discussing literature and reminiscing about their heady youth while wearing iridescent colour-coordinated knits.

Almodovar frames them in vivid close-ups. Moore’s face is alight with empathy despite Ingrid’s consternation at being an accomplice in euthanasia, and Swinton gets paler and more gaunt.

One could gaze at them all day.

Their adaptation of American writer Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through is otherwise an airless chamber drama when it is not plain clumsy, like in its flashbacks to Martha’s doomed teenage romance with the father of her estranged daughter.

The female experience remains Almodovar’s fondest theme, and there is also here the 75-year-old director’s recent rumination on mortality that was so moving in his autobiographical Pain And Glory (2019).

Still, absent the carnal pleasures and playfulness, this is an Almodovar movie mostly in look only.

Hot take: The two actresses, the very finest, paper over a thin melodrama about women on the verge of a terminal breakdown.