The Room Next Door: Almodóvar’s graceful exploration of mortality and friendship

• Reviewed from the 2024 Venice International Film Festival

If Pedro Almodóvar was apprehensive about directing his first English-language feature, one would not guess from the story he has chosen to tell with The Room Next Door, a nuanced meditation on mortality and friendship. A calm chamber piece (with a subtle shading of political comment) that’s attuned to the momentous plot but foregoes theatrics, it stars Tilda Swinton as a terminally ill journalist who asks an old friend, a writer (Julianne Moore), to stand vigil in the days leading up to her self-administered suicide. 

“I’ve been reduced to very little of myself,” Martha (Swinton) says, stopped short by cancer after covering war and tragedy across the globe. Since she doesn’t seem to overlap with her friend in New York literary circles as before, Ingrid (Moore) is surprised at Martha’s request for accompaniment, and wonders why someone closer to her wasn’t chosen. But rather than emphasise a distance between the two, or invite our pity, Almodóvar’s positioning of their friendship subtly frames death as something with which we are familiar but will get to know much more deeply. 

Martha and Ingrid stay in a rented modernist house in woodsy upstate New York. But The Room Next Door – the title derived from Martha’s wish to have Ingrid close by when she dies, though not in the room proper – is not a play-like two-hander in a secluded house. Almodóvar’s adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through fills out the story with the pair first reconnecting in New York City, meetings with a former lover (John Turturro) who warns Ingrid of the legal dangers of assisted suicide, a smattering of illustrative flashbacks, and final chapters that pull in the local police and then an unexpected visitor. The city sequences suggest that Almodóvar is sweetly enamoured with an earlier era of New York artists and cognoscenti, when, as one character describes it, “anything important happened at night”. 

Ingrid and Martha are therefore hyperliterate heroines, which helps explain the writerly dialogue that some critics have seen as demonstrating Almodóvar’s unease with English. But each woman is figuring out how to articulate the story of her life, her successes, her loves, and what death holds. The Room Next Door chimes with Pain and Glory (2019) in grappling with pain and the body, and with the series of farewells that is intrinsic to living within time. Almodóvar, as a lover of classical Hollywood, might also imagine Martha’s chosen final exit as her staging her own death scene; she and Ingrid spend at one point watch movies late into the morning, including Huston’s The Dead (1987). 

Swinton remains one of the great voyagers of cinema, here taking us to the brink of the beyond, but Almodóvar and DP Eduard Grau do not shoot her as the otherworldly being she has often embodied. Swinton conveys the weariness and the wisdom in Martha, who’s at peace with her decision. Ingrid is introduced autographing her latest tome at a classy bookstore, but Moore leans into the writer’s worries about the whole process, getting a grip only to lose it again; as ever, the actress organically evokes layers of weakness and strength, and the rush of fears and doubts. 

To Almodóvar, this is also not just a matter of one sick person’s tragedy. How the police react to the arrangement underlines the interference that the law can pose to dying with dignity; the director’s public statements have been quite explicit about supporting euthanasia rights. The film’s conversations recognise that the world at large is sick, too, even dying, all the more reason for the terminally ill to be allowed to choose their own fates. 

Almodóvar’s 23rd feature might sound like an outlier in his oeuvre, though this latest “late movie” shows glimmers of his customary high design: the drawers of knickknacks in Martha’s desk, the bold-hued outfit that Martha chooses for a fateful day, a transcendent tinted shot that evokes a twilit snow globe. This time, Almodóvar’s cinema creates a space for us to collect our thoughts about what awaits in the big room next door. 

 ► The Room Next Door is in UK cinemas 25 October.