The Room Next Door review: Pedro Almodóvar’s American dream

What connects the Bhagavad Gita to the illuminating musings of French philosopher, playwright and poet Simone Weil, Irish author James Joyce and filmmakers John Huston and Buster Keating?

Death, or rather rebirth.

Prolific Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s shimmering Venice Film Festival Golden Lion-winning first feature film in English, The Room Next Door, is alive with the idea that art is immortal. That it’s all connected, with one door opened leading to another as we strive for greater meaning, or at the very least, a real good time before we’re gone.

Leaning towards the latter, the always-incandescent Tilda Swinton’s Martha is a rather bohemian former war correspondent, fond of colour-blocking outfits that pop and bluntly calling the shots. She has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. This alarming news, whispered on the grapevine, winds its way towards the ears of Julianne Moore’s successful author, Ingrid, at a book signing.

Somewhere along the lines, the pair lost touch, but there’s no real schism here. Life just got in the way. And so, despite her paralysing fear of death, Ingrid races to Martha’s hospital bedside, where that accidental distance melts like the pink-hued snow falling on a fairytale version of Manhattan, instead mostly shot in Madrid, where Almodóvar lives.

Watch the trailer for The Room Next Door.

As the women fall effortlessly back into each other’s arms and lilting rhythms, Martha presents Ingrid with an impossible dilemma: aid in ending her life on her terms via a dark web-sourced pill. But not before they retreat to an idyllic architectural escape for sunbathing and a movie marathon.

Room Next Door: drama

Bearing both the melancholic heart of Almodóvar’s more recent movies Pain and Glory and Parallel Mothers, plus their undimmed sass, The Room Next Door is a highly stylised and yet streamlined adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s already trim novel What Are You Going Through. Nunez, in turn, borrowed the title from Weil’s writings on the nature of mortality in her essay collection, Waiting for God. Weil read and was captivated by Hindu scripture as a kid.

Ever driven by matriarchal power, Almodóvar channels both, also doffing his cap to fellow filmmaker John Huston’s final film, The Dead, adapted from Joyce’s short story of the same name. Martha and Ingrid are moved by a rewatch of it, with Swinton relishing reciting Joyce’s closing lines.

They also make room for the palette-cleansing laughs of Keaton’s rockslide-dodging in Seven Chances and the romantic swell of Roberto Rossellini’s Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders-led Voyage to Italy.

Yes, both leads affect the camp artifice so redolent of Almodóvar’s cinematic output, if perhaps less recognisable to some, given it’s now in English. But the plot is notably more muted than his usual output or Moore’s duelling turn in Todd Hayne’s May December opposite Natalie Portman. Clearly enjoying himself in batting our more melodramatic expectations aside, Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door is not a film driven by big dramatic swings.

A gym hunk is just for hugs. Even a possible flashpoint sparked by the arrival of John Turturro’s Damian, a climate doom-spouting academic and former love of both women, doesn’t derail Ingrid and Martha’s reunion, nor does a brief segue into police procedural territory.

A flashback to a burning house and how that’s blown up to encompass the cataclysmic conflagration of the Vietnam War is the closest we come to capital D drama, but even then, it’s measured.

Room Next Door: intimate

Instead, The Room Next Door is an intimately drawn salute to the shared strength of women, first and foremost, and a gently unfurling morality play second. Ingrid’s never appalled by Martha’s desire, only devastated at the thought of losing her so soon after reconnecting and confronted by the reality of the impending moment when a closed door will signal the deed is done.

A titanic pairing, Moore and Swinton are quietly commanding in a tender film that brims over with love and forgiveness, spilling out into the deliberately set-like architectural porn to die for Almodóvar has made a career out of deploying. Cinematographer Eduard Grau ably captures their little ticks, with Moore enjoying a particular knack for holding pinched pain just below the surface of her skin, as we witness Ingrid figuring it all out.

Stoic-to-a-tee as Martha, the magnificent Swinton previously starred in Almodóvar’s first dalliance in English, 2020’s half-hour short The Human Voice, as an abandoned lover in a spin on the Jean Cocteau play that was also adapted by Rossellini. Of course, Cocteau’s influence is also woven into Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, with all this intertextuality further enriching the idea that all art is connected. That no idea dies.

The filmmaker’s American dream, also building on his Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal-driven short, queer Western Strange Way of Life, is part of a grand lineage and joyful reminder that we will all walk the same road. So the sooner we speak truthfully about it with our loved ones, the better, with the great Almodóvar as our guide.

The Room Next Door is in cinemas from 26 December 2024.

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