On the southern slope of Monte Abantos, an hour from Madrid, there is a house of glass and corten steel. Almodóvar found it before he found his cast. Before Tilda Swinton, before Julianne Moore, before a single line about friendship or dying was written, there was this house.

Casa Szoke. Designed by Madrid studio Aranguren + Gallegos, inspired by Le Corbusier's box-like creations. The third character in The Room Next Door.

Almodóvar chose a house before he chose his cast. His production designer, Inbal Weinberg, has said they wanted a space defined by unusual angles and sloping ceilings, a house designed to unsettle rather than soothe, which is exactly what two people confronting death needed around them.

The film tells the story of two women who have not seen each other in years, one dying, one accompanying her. They leave Manhattan and retreat to a modernist house in a pine forest to prepare for an ending. Set in upstate New York. Shot entirely in Spain.

What Almodóvar understood is that Casa Szoke's angled walls and sloped ceilings don't let a body settle. Every room keeps pointing back at the forest outside, which is exactly what two people confronting death can't look away from.

The diagonal lines provided drama. The angular windows held tension. The juxtaposition of linear planes against nature's curves, the geometry of the building against the softness of the pines, created something no interior set could replicate. Not comfort. Something closer to clarity, a place that refuses to let you look away from what's actually happening.

Most architecture films document buildings the way photographs do, from a fixed distance, composed for the eye. Wenders does the opposite. Architecture, Zumthor has long argued, isn't finished when it's built, it's finished when a body occupies it and the space starts to register on the skin. So the camera doesn't observe his buildings, it moves through them the way a body would, inhabited, walked through, built. Less a film about architecture than a film about dwelling, in the sense the philosophers use the word: a house not as a container we live in afterward, but an idea we live inside from the start.

From Inside Out — The Architecture of Peter Zumthor, directed by Wim Wenders. Filmed over fourteen years through cutting-edge 3D cinematography. The film takes you inside Zumthor's buildings through the eyes of the people who inhabit them, journeying from intimate private homes to the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA in Los Angeles.

Zumthor builds slowly. Selectively. His Bruder Klaus Field Chapel, a concrete interior open to the sky, makes people weep without understanding why. His Thermal Baths at Vals, stone and water and silence so precisely calibrated that the body responds before the mind catches up. And his own home and studio in Haldenstein, the farmstead he settled into in the late 1970s and never left, the one place in the film he didn't design for someone else.

Peter Zumthor has no website, no press office, and for most of his career he has refused phone interviews, summoning journalists instead to his studio in Haldenstein.

He is known for vetting clients and making them wait, one story has a wealthy prospective client traveling to his studio four separate times before he agreed to hear the commission out.

In fifty years of practice, his firm has completed roughly thirty projects, a number many architects surpass in five.

Which is what makes this year's Venice premiere feel like a reversal. A man who has spent five decades declining to explain himself is now the subject of a feature documentary at the world's most photographed festival. Wim Wenders didn't get an interview out of Zumthor. He got fourteen years, and a camera let inside the rooms instead.