Two women stand on the verge of an emotionally wrenching decision in Pedro Almodóvar’s first full English-language feature, The Room Next Door. Featuring richly textured lead performances by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, this impeccably tailored two-hander feels modest by the veteran Spanish maestro’s operatic standards – indeed, as the title implies, it almost has the dimensions of a chamber drama. The key themes are also unrelentingly heavy: terminal illness, euthanasia, estranged families, catastrophic climate crisis. But as ever with Almodóvar, the healing balms of beauty, art, friendship, love and sex offer some consolation in the darkness, including a small but obligatory queer subplot.
World premiering in Venice this week, with a North American premiere to follow at New York Film Festival in October, The Room Next Door is a minor addition to the Almodóvar Cinematic Universe, low on lusty spark or mischievous humour. Even so, it should play well to his loyal fanbase, with English-language dialogue and world-famous stars potentially translating into wider audiences. The director’s regular distributors Sony Classics are handling North American rights while Warner Brothers cover most of Europe and other territories.
Respect to Almodóvar for making his full-length English-language debut at the age of 74, an extended late-career experiment which began with two short films in English: the loose Jean Cocteau adaptation The Human Voice (2020), which also starred Swinton, and the queer western Strange Way of Life (2023), co-starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal. The Room Next Door is also a very rare adapted screenplay from the veteran Spanish auteur, working here from American author Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through. Even so, he makes this story feel personal, like a sister film to his self-penned, elegiac, heavily autobiographical Pain and Glory (2019), which won multiple prizes and Oscar nominations.
The unnamed narrator of the Nunez novel is here given a name, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a New York-based author of around 60, who reconnects with an old friend, war correspondent Martha (Swinton), after learning the latter is having chemotherapy for cervical cancer. As the pair rekindle their friendship, forged during the hedonistic whirl of 1980s Manhattan, Martha fills Ingrid in about her painful back story as a teenage mother (played in flashback by Esther McGregor, daughter of Ewan) and the long-estranged daughter she has not seen for decades.
After her treatment fails, Martha learns her cancer is incurable and terminal. She demands a big favour from Ingrid, asking her to accompany her on a farewell vacation trip, where she plans to end her life using an illegally acquired suicide pill. Initially reluctant, daunted both by emotional and legal complications, Ingrid eventually agrees to assist Martha’s final act, which unfolds in a luxurious modernist villa in upstate New York. “I think I deserve a good death,” she explains, framing her battle with the disease as the last of her many wars. “Cancer can’t get me if I get me first.”
The talk-heavy screenplay is peppered with gently philosophical advice about how best to face the inevitable, universal experience of death: whether hope is better than despair, whether sex and art have any therapeutic value, whether the people and places we love hold us back or ease our passage when the end comes. Playing a key symbolic role in this debate is John Turturro’s secondary character Damian, a former lover of both Martha and Ingrid, now an apocalyptic prophet of climate-change doom. He is angry about the entire planet dying, not just Martha, but the film presents his rage as just one approach. “There are many ways of living through tragedy,” Ingrid tells him. Some of these exchanges shade into “live, laugh, love” glibness in places, but Almodóvar mostly sticks to clear-eyed empathy, not magical thinking.
Maybe it is the shift to English language, the solemn subject matter or merely his own advancing years, but Almodóvar’s signature hot-blooded vivacity is more muted than usual here. The vivid colour palette, stylish clothes and sumptuous interiors remain, but the emotional temperature is cool and the dialogue has a slightly starchy, stagey feel. Watching these well-heeled Manhattanites wax lyrical about love and death in their luxurious apartments inevitably invokes Woody Allen in his more stilted, middlebrow mode. A closing scene exploring the legal aftermath of Martha’s euthanasia is dispensed with too briskly while a final casting twist, involving doppelgangers and dual roles, feels a little like a stunt, thought it does possess a certain poetic symmetry.
Typically for Almodóvar, The Room Next Door is a glossy, poised, elegant confection. A string-heavy score by Alberto Iglesias is silky and eloquent, invoking golden-age Hollywood. The handsome locations were partly shot in New York, though Madrid also stands in for many American scenes, which helps explain why various minor characters speak English with thick Spanish accents.
Cultural homages also abound, old and new, from vintage Buster Keaton movies to Roger Lewis’ widely praised 2023 biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Erotic Vagrancy. These are small but charmingly personal touches, the director lightly stamping his own personality on another writer’s work. A casual reference to the closing passage in James Joyce’s The Dead, about snow falling across Ireland, becomes a recurring motif that Almodóvar reworks for his own lyrical, moving finale. Sporadically profound, if a little too tastefully understated, The Room Next Door leaves us with one key take-home message: you may well be dying, but you still need to die with fabulous hair and a gorgeous outfit.
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar, from the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola, Juan Diego Botto, Raúl Arévalo, Victoria Luengo, Alex Hogh Andersen, Esther McGregor, Alvise Rigo
Cinematographer: Edu Grau
Editor: Teresa Font
Production Designer: Inbal Weinberg
Costume Designer: Bina Daigeler
Music: Alberto Iglesias
Producers: Agustin Almodóvar, Esther García
Production company: El Deseo (Spain)
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In English
107 minutes
