Til­da Swin­ton sits for Pedro Almod­ó­var in The Human Voice trailer

Not even a glob­al pan­dem­ic can stop Pedro Almod­ó­var from cre­at­ing his paeans to the strength, com­po­sure and com­plex­i­ty of wom­ankind. Among the first sur­re­al stills to depict a film­mak­er pro­ceed­ing with their work under quar­an­tine was a pho­to of Almod­ó­var direct­ing Til­da Swin­ton, and now a new trail­er shows the result of that del­i­cate process.

The short they made togeth­er, an adap­ta­tion of Jean Cocteau’s one-act play ​‘The Human Voice’, has had pos­i­tive show­ings at the scaled-back film fes­ti­vals in Venice and New York over the past few weeks. This teas­er gives the rest of us a taste of this min­i­mal­ist col­lab­o­ra­tion between two titans in their fields, a long over­due linkup between kin­dred artists.

In the 30-minute film, Swin­ton por­trays a name­less woman beset by anx­i­ety and pan­ic, wan­der­ing around her col­or-sat­u­rat­ed yet total­ly emp­ty home in an atmos­phere of iso­la­tion all too apro­pos for our cur­rent moment. Inte­ri­or design meets men­tal inte­ri­or­i­ty as she reflects on her lone­li­ness, the fur­nish­ings a rich metaphor for her state of mind artic­u­lat­ed through the wist­ful, melo­dra­mat­ic, clas­si­cal­ly Almod­ó­var­i­an voiceover narration.

The film will indeed show at the remain­ing UK cin­e­mas still in oper­a­tion, with a ​“spe­cial event” pre­mière set for 7 Novem­ber – to sweet­en the deal, the film itself will be screened as a pack­age with a pre-taped inter­view between Almod­ó­var and Swin­ton host­ed by the Observer’s Mark Ker­mode. (The whole pro­gram will re-play start­ing the next day.) A release for the US has yet to be set, though Sony Pic­tures Clas­sics has snapped up the rights and will sure­ly run the title in time to col­lect a Best Live Action Short stat­uette at the Oscars.

The clip below gives us pre­cious lit­tle more than Swin­ton swan­ning about in a mag­nif­i­cent hoop dress and tak­ing a seat, the weight of years bear­ing down on her. That ges­ture alone seems to con­tain a world of sig­nif­i­cance and mean­ing – Almod­ó­var can do more in 30 min­utes than most direc­tors can man­age at feature-length.

The Human Voice comes to cin­e­mas in the UK on 7 November.