Recently, Tilda Swinton, the Scottish queer actress (or rather queer fish, as she calls herself), was awarded the Honorary Golden Bear for her lifetime achievement at Berlinale. Tilda is also known as “a messenger from another dimension,” “Derek Jarman’s muse,” and “David Bowie’s cousin.” She is the ultimate shapeshifter – the more eccentric the role, or at least the physical transformation, the better. This flamboyant, epic career – where Swinton has played archangels, witches, vampires, aliens, oracle dogs, hunched old characters (both women and men), mothers and daughters at the same time (even twice in the same decade), has multiplied, cut her hair, frozen butterflies with a spear, levitated, gone to bed as a man and woken up as a woman, died and come back to life – now seems to be nearing its end. Not long ago, Swinton stated that she might retire from cinema to provide palliative care, and The Room Next Door (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2024) is precisely about that. In fact, her latest roles are largely about different ways of confronting illness, death, and signs from the afterlife – and they also seem like deeply personal explorations.

I’ve been haunted for some time, ever since I saw Memoria (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021), by the moment when she waltzes with a stray dog on the streets of Bogotá, in the middle of traffic, each watching the other intently – the camera is so distant from this little scene that you can barely even recognize Swinton; or the scene where, suddenly, after eating a sandwich, she performs a handkerchief trick. Tilda’s voice is soft, hypnotic, perhaps therapeutic, but what I find most mesmerizing is her interplay with light, with air, with the unseen. She has an eternal melancholic aura, the closest thing to an alien, if you ask me.

Any attempt to understander or to decipher her (assuming there were a key somewhere, like in movies about artificial intelligence) would be futile and incomplete; her mystery can only be compared to things from other planets. What I did instead was to visualize her in seven of her most unusual and unexpected incarnations – a sort of glossary of Swintonesque moments.

 ***

Sleeping Tilda

The Maybe (1995/2013)

“Living artist, glass, steel, mattress, pillow, linen, water and spectacles”

That was on display at MoMA in 2013 (reprising an installation from 1995), when Tilda repeatedly moved her single, glass-sealed bed from one room to another, incognito, allowing visitors to watch her sleeping, dozing, meditating, motionless, with her eyes closed. If Tilda happened to turn over, the viewers would shift as well. The first performance came in response to Derek Jarman’s death in 1994, and the second followed the passing of her mother. In her choices over recent years, a deep fascination with death has emerged – a desire to experience it as vividly, as closely as possible. It’s a total exposure of the body, trapped in a crystal capsule, like a Snow White frozen in a moment in time; an effort to “look death in the eye,” a phrase Swinton frequently repeats about her experiences as a caregiver for loved ones who have passed away. Ultimately, this performance art piece, created with Cornelia Parker, also carries a sense of uncertainty – sometimes death looks like a deep sleep from which someone simply never wakes up.

Throughout her career, Swinton has shown a deep affinity for sleep. In Orlando (dir. Sally Potter, 1992), she falls into a deep slumber three times (in the novel, Virginia Woolf heavily metaphors these moments, emphasizing the impossibility of waking up, as if Orlando has completely crossed into some other metaphysical realm). There’s something absolutely fascinating in the way Tilda performs sleep, falling asleep, and waking up. That last awakening, for example, is bathed in an ethereal light, where the dust caught on camera appears soft and gentle, as if it too had just emerged from a dream. In Caravaggio (dir. Derek Jarman, 1986), her first film, her character dies but continues to pose as a muse for her lover’s paintings.

In The Room Next Door, Almodóvar completely fetishizes her exhausted, sickly, excessively pale face; he films her multiple times sleeping and waking, until finally, when she dies, she does so in her sleep – bathed in light, lying on a deck chair, surrounded by an endless chorus of birds. Having spent the film discussing Edward Hopper, Swinton’s character chooses how and when she will die – and does so, unsurprisingly, theatrically and pictorially, in a Hopperesque manner. In fact, the entire film is a vignette about frozen time and personal and universal endings.

In Memoria, we see Tilda sleeping only once, at the beginning of the film, suddenly awakened by a loud, metallic noise – an interference that jolts even the viewer out of Weerasethakul’s usual hypnotic state. The fear that the sound could return at any moment consumes Jessica, sending her on a search for its origin. It’s mesmerizing how Weerasethakul stitches together this character’s internal reality, subtly shifting from earthly existence to a metaphysical one, without ever making the ground beneath her feet feel like it’s disappearing. Jessica witnesses a moment where a man dozes off on the grass – this initial drowsiness turns into death, only for the man to come back to life before our eyes.

Alien Tilda

I’m surprised to find only two films where Tilda plays an alien per se: Friendship’s Death (dir. Peter Wollen, 1987) and Last and First Men (dir. Jóhann Jóhannsson, 2020). In the former, there’s nothing particularly strange about her character, named Friendship, who describes herself as an alien, a simulation, sees a typewriter as “a distant cousin”, claims to have a “tin heart”, and has come to Earth to bring peace. In the latter, she’s merely a distant, flat voice. This bizarre ambivalence – a foreign being in a woman’s body, moving and speaking like a human – dominates the entire film. Wollen never shows this creature’s robotic insides, nor does he depict her doing anything particularly sophisticated; she appears, by all accounts, just a little odd.

This paradox drives a poor journalist (Bill Paterson) to exasperation – he rifles through her belongings because he absolutely refuses to believe she’s from another galaxy and lacks a digestive system, he tries to get her drunk, and so on. And what does he find in the colourful make-up bag that this mysterious creature in oriental clothes carries around? A collection of Lego-like pieces – glowing, plastic, which at night emit information, whispers, fragments of sentences. We never actually witness the death Wollen foreshadows, though we expect it; instead, the film’s epilogue leaves us with a hard drive of her memory, a virtual collection of flickering images, revealing how this alien sees and feels.

In Last and First Men, Tilda is a recording left for posterity, a monologue over empty, cold, desolate, and rusting monuments. These two films go hand in hand beautifully – it’s as if director Jóhann Jóhannsson had gifted Wollen’s film a kind of sequel.

Tender Tilda

Swinton is often described as androgynous, a quality that has long cemented her status as a queer icon – largely due to her complex role in Orlando and her striking blend of masculine and feminine features. In general, she gravitates toward roles where she is rather cold, distant, impenetrable. Even in a role where she exudes a tender melancholia (Only Lovers Left Alive, dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2013), she still gives off a sense of harshness.

But then, there’s I Am Love / Io sono l’amore (dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2009). Nowhere else has Tilda ever been more feminine or ravishing: she plays an aristocrat caught in a fleeting affair with a man her son’s age (who also happens to be his friend). She is consumed by a constant sexual drive, which Guadagnino renders in an almost Hitchcockian manner, lingering in her mind beyond the physical encounters with her lover. She abandons control in favour of total escapism – outdoor sex, messy, unafraid of leaving traces (locks of hair, a magazine, a secret recipe – all left behind in her lover’s house).

In perhaps the film’s most intense sequence, the lovers’ orgasm is interwoven with images of rose petals, swarming bees, and murmuring brooks. This is what it means to be warm, to be alive, to breathe love.

Cool Tilda

Tilda Swinton’s film costumes are unforgettable. Take the vibrant sweater from The Room Next Door – which I later spotted in an interview she gave. It’s her own sweater, brought from home – what a tender gesture! Both in The Human Voice (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 2020) and The Room Next Door, Swinton is hyper-idiosyncratic, perfectly symmetrical, meticulously colour-coordinated (even her pills – red, yellow, and white – are a direct match to her outfits).

She’s just as effortlessly cool in A Bigger Splash (dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2015), where she plays a rock star on vocal rest – draped in leather ensembles, breezy linens, and flowing silks.

In Only Lovers Left Alive, her coolness is all about gestures and objects: she wears wigs made of sheep’s wool, leather gloves, and sunglasses. Her slow, deliberate movements through the streets of Tangier and the way she reads books – only touching them lightly with her fingers, as if she doesn’t want to fracture their cellulose – make her seem almost weightless. At the opposite pole, there are the heavy, broom-like wings she sports in Constantine (dir. Francis Lawrence, 2005).

A key part of Tilda’s coolness is her ever-evolving hair – often short, swept to one side, frequently platinum blonde, evoking Bowie. Sometimes, it’s a striking copper, as in Caravaggio. It’s interesting to note that Tilda has largely kept her hair short since Io sono l’amore.

Double / Quadruple Tilda

Swinton is probably Cate Blanchett’s twin as well as Bowie’s cousin; both actresses enjoy playing double, triple, even quadruple roles. Swinton does this even more frequently than Blanchett. Here’s a short list: The Room Next Door, Okja (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2017), Hail, Caesar! (dir. Ethan & Joel Coen, 2016), The Eternal Daughter (dir. Joanna Hogg, 2022), The Protagonists (dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2022; in every scene, she has a different set of eyebrows, does that count?), Suspiria (dir. Luca Guadagnino, 2018).

But I can’t leave out the experimental camp film Teknolust (dir. Lynn Hershman Leeson, 2002), where she plays a scientist with a Dr. Frankenstein-like appetite: she clones herself three times and sends her replicas out to study, to prostitute themselves, to wreak havoc in the respectable buildings of the patriarchy. Swinton appears four times in the same shot.

Metamorphic Tilda

Swinton has a collection of almost grotesque roles, complete transformations that exaggerate features and flaws, altering her voice and enunciation: in Snowpiercer (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2013), she plays a caricature – a commander with rotten teeth, a disfigured nose, and a shrill voice; in Suspiria, one of the three roles she plays is an elderly professor (credited under a fictional actor’s name, Lutz Ebersdorf, with Swinton and Guadagnino spinning an entire backstory about this aged actor who apparently wants to keep out of the public eye; unlike most of her roles, where she remains recognizable in some way, here she is utterly untraceable); and as an old woman in The Grand Budapest Hotel (dir. Wes Anderson, 2014).

Hysterical Tilda

How does Swinton play hysteria? Despite most of her roles being marked by total calmness, here she is in The Human Voice – trapped in an artificial studio, murmuring after a man who exists only as a voice on the other end of a phone line and as a suit laid out on a bed. She buys an axe and slashes the suit to shreds, and in the apotheosis of it all, she sets the entire studio on fire. The most Almodóvar-esque definition of hysteria is distilled into a single image: a gargantuan bottle of Chanel No. 5 sitting in a bathroom flooded with sedatives.

The most Almodóvar-esque definition of hysteria is distilled into a single image: a gargantuan bottle of Chanel No. 5 sitting in a bathroom flooded with sedatives.

Swinton also delivers a breakdown in We Need to Talk About Kevin (dir. Lynne Ramsay, 2011), but she plays it petrified – she is shown in a frozen state, staring into a vase, gazing beyond objects, growing paler and more translucent than ever (heightened by the fact that her character is a brunette). Swinton is at her absolute peak in this role (though very theatrically demonstrative): she portrays a woman who gradually loses all her light and vitality, simply withering away.

Georgiana Mușat

Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.