Strange Way of Life (2023) – A Quiet Storm of Desire, Guilt, and the American Wound
There are films that speak in gunfire, others in silence. Strange Way of Life, the 2023 short Western drama directed by Pedro Almodóvar, doesn’t so much “speak” as it breathes—slowly, sensually, painfully—through dust, sweat, and unspoken memory. It’s a film that feels both impossibly intimate and mythically wide, as if it were shot inside the heart of two men and stretched across the horizon of a fading West.
What Brokeback Mountain did for mainstream queer cinema in the wilderness, Strange Way of Life does in the shadow of aging, regret, and unfinished longing.
Set against the blistering backdrop of a desert town somewhere between law and lawlessness, the story follows two former gunslingers: Silva (Pedro Pascal), a rancher arriving on horseback after twenty-five years, and Sheriff Jake (Ethan Hawke), who wears his badge like a burden and his pain like a secret too sharp to touch.
From the moment Silva walks into town, it’s clear he’s not just visiting. There’s a history here, and it’s burning beneath every line of dialogue, every sideways glance. What begins as a reunion quickly spirals into a reckoning.
Jake is investigating a murder. Silva’s son is involved. But neither man can focus on justice while trying to survive the weight of what they left unsaid decades ago.
What makes Strange Way of Life so haunting isn’t the action—it’s the restraint. Every word is charged with double meaning. A shared bottle of whiskey feels like communion. A remembered night in Mexico lingers like smoke. Theirs is a love that was real, but never allowed to live in daylight.
Pedro Almodóvar, in his first English-language film, brings his trademark color and texture to a genre so often painted in sepia and blood. Here, he gives us a Western draped in emerald silk and aching violin. There’s a scene where Silva stands alone in Jake’s bedroom, fingers grazing an old photograph, and the silence around him is thunderous. You feel time folding in on itself.
The performances are astonishing. Pedro Pascal is all open vulnerability and raw emotion, a man unafraid to look at another man and ask, “Did you ever think of me?” His eyes say what his lips don’t dare. Ethan Hawke, on the other hand, is a fortress cracked at the edges—his Jake is stoic, haunted, furious with himself for wanting what the world said he shouldn’t. Together, they create a dynamic that is tender, volatile, and unforgettable.
Though the film runs under 40 minutes, it feels as rich and complete as an epic. It’s a chamber piece within a ghost town, a love letter scrawled in dust and dried blood. There’s tension, yes—guns are drawn, lines are crossed—but the real battle is interior. Between duty and desire. Between survival and surrender.
The cinematography is exquisite. The desert is both vast and intimate, like the mind of a man remembering a love he cannot bury. Almodóvar’s use of color—emerald green shirts, amber dawns, crimson sunrises—turns the film into a painting in motion.
And then there’s the music. Alberto Iglesias’s score hums like a lost hymn, rising and falling with the emotional tide of the two men. It carries their love, their shame, and their silence across time, across miles, across lifetimes.
Strange Way of Life is not just a revisionist Western—it is a reclamation. Of queer love, of masculinity redefined, of the mythic American soul interrogated through European eyes. It dares to ask: What happens when cowboys cry? When they remember? When they no longer ride off into the sunset, but turn around and ask why they ever left?
Final Score: 9.6/10
Strengths: Devastating performances, stunning visual poetry, a script that says everything in what it doesn’t say, and a rare queer romance treated with dignity and depth.
Possible flaw: Its short runtime leaves you aching for more—yet maybe that’s its final gift: a wound that never closes.
Watch it not just for what happens—but for what could have. What should have. And what still burns in the dust behind every strange way a life can go.