The Room Next Door
(Spanish: La habitación de al lado)
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
Ingrid and Martha were close friends when they were young, working for the same magazine. Ingrid went on to become a writer of semi-autobiographical novels, while Martha became a war reporter, and, as often happens in life, they lost touch. They haven’t spoken for years when they meet again in an extreme but strangely sweet circumstance.
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Why Almodóvar’s Film Celebrates Life
In The Room Next Door, the Spanish director tackles the subject of euthanasia without ideological bitterness. He dives into the drama of existence with painful empathy and touching humanity.
by Renato Butera
Finally, a recognition with the highest award from a Film Festival: the Venice Film Festival, the same festival where Pedro Almodóvar began his career as a “terrible” director, with his controversial Dark Habits (1983), despite opposition from the Christian Democrats (as he himself once declared). The same festival that made him internationally known with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988); awarded him a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (2019); and now crowns him with the Golden Lion for his The Room Next Door (2024). The Oscar-winning director for All About My Mother adds the highest honor to his collection, awarded by one of the two oldest and most prestigious film festivals (Cannes being the other, alongside Venice).
And finally, here is a film that represents the transition from “glocalism” to internationalism; a film that needed two cosmopolitan muses of extraordinary iconic and symbolic beauty like no other of the Almodóvar “chicas” (though all extraordinary) could provide. Those “girls” have now become “ladies” with dramatic elegance reminiscent of Douglas Sirk and the expressive intensity of Bergman. The powerful faces of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore couldn’t have done a better job at conveying and enhancing the story of friendship and compassion narrated in the film with their intense expressiveness.
Raimunda and Agustina from Volver have grown up and are no longer afraid of death. The last taboo has been overcome. The solidarity that has so often characterized the sisterhood and femininity in Almodóvar’s personal style has played a decisive role once again. Ingrid, played by Julianne Moore, can now write differently about death. And Pedro, whose personal anxieties are embodied in the protagonist, has developed a sense of death, transcending the fear of dying and discovering that only love, in its most authentic forms—including friendship—is the remedy that can make us accept the torment of the “next-door” ending.
The story, written with the masterful narrative skill Almodóvar has employed in all his films (almost always exclusively, even those based on literary works by others), is inspired by the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez. The titles of both the cinematic and literary works converge in this interpretation of the final event that comes to every human being.
Death has been a recurring theme throughout many of the Spanish director’s films, from Matador to Pain and Glory, passing through masterpieces like Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Broken Embraces, Julieta, and especially Volver. In Volver (where we recall the extraordinary tomb-cleaning scene), the director expressed his repeated refusal to accept death, declaring his incomprehension and anger, much like Judith does in her latest book. Almodóvar tackles it in the same way he has always rejected the human sense of pain and illness that had inevitably touched his life and the lives of those he loves.
In his latest film, the director faces all of this head-on with a thoughtful reflection on euthanasia, a topic that still provokes heated debates between opposing views and has only found legal recognition in a few countries, and even then, with difficulty. The film presents itself as a deep ethical reflection on “end of life” issues and seeks to help overcome the conflict often influenced by tradition and political choices that are not always, as people are led to believe, rooted in religion.
What truly matters is the call that Almodóvar aims to reignite—a discussion on a painful subject that awakens our awareness of the value of life, from birth to its end. The debate, as it involves humanity’s deepest emotions, cannot be approached with harmful superficiality nor dismissed with damaging determination. Humanity must always win. The Spanish director’s provocation no longer carries the grotesque and kitschy tones of his earlier films (apart from the “functional comic relief” provided by the couple of gay missionaries). Instead, it has matured beautifully, and it now demands an equally mature dialogue, grounded in the belief in the value of life and the dignity of every living being.
In this context, words prove once again to be therapeutic. The director has already shown us the “healing” power of words (Talk to Her, above all, but not exclusively). When words are used with the intent to heal and “connect,” they can bring about the “miracle” of friendship and solidarity, of closeness and openness. Miracles that take place in the film, adding even more value to the story of Martha and Judith (what courage to tell the story of a friendship between two mature women!). The film’s nod to the pandemic and enforced isolation shows how the blackout of words and relationships can have disastrous consequences, causing irreparable damage or revealing missed opportunities.
Pedro Almodóvar’s “English” film, despite the underlying political stance it proposes, is a moving film that celebrates the beauty of human life, with its dramas and hopes, joys and frailties. It’s a humanity fully realized when the good of others takes precedence over personal, collective, or fanatical interests. It’s a work that, as Cardinal Zuppi put it, “puts the person and their questions at the center.”
Cinematografo, September 8, 2024
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Amid architectural geometries, primary colors bursting on screen, and numerous pictorial, literary, and cinematic references, La stanza accanto by Pedro Almodóvar offers a reflection on death as a work of art. In competition at Venice 81.
by Daria Pomponio
Just add a bit of fiction
Human lives are rarely perfect, fully enjoyable, or fulfilling, as they are filled with encounters and unexpected events, small and big mistakes, and subsequent regrets. Perhaps, though, it is in the act of dying that one can make satisfying, even aesthetic choices. This seems to be the reflection that led Pedro Almodóvar to return to the theme of the end of life—already explicitly central, along with his personal and creative crisis, in Pain and Glory—with La stanza accanto (The Room Next Door), presented in competition at Venice 81.
Structured as a thriller-noir with vaguely Chabrol-like tones, this first English-language film by the Spanish director stars two narrators: writer Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and war reporter Martha (Tilda Swinton). The former has just published a book about death, which hasn’t helped her at all to accept the fact that “something alive can suddenly no longer be.” Her passion for art and impossible love stories has now led her to plan a fictionalized biography of the American painter Dora Carrington, including her troubled relationship with the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey. As for Martha, La stanza accanto is mainly her story, as she discovers she has terminal cancer and begins to share fragments of her life with her old friend Ingrid: the father she never knew, the daughter she no longer speaks to, and that time when, as a war reporter, she added fictional elements to one of her reports, which she left unpublished. With little time left to live, Martha asks her friend to be there—though in the next room—while she ends her life, before losing her physical and mental faculties.
Under the fascinating and enveloping dome of a human melodrama, but not at all tearful, Almodóvar presents his reflection on storytelling—about oneself and others—and the ethical issues this entails. As the film progresses and the tension mounts towards the anticipated act, the metacinematic aspect of La stanza accanto also emerges, for what is unfolding is essentially the writing of a script, the preparation for a role—complete with the reconstruction of the character’s life—and the final performance. “Films are more harmonious than life,” François Truffaut said in Day for Night, and art in general is. This is something Almodóvar, as an intellectual and aesthete, knows well. And so, amid architectural geometries, sober and refined clothing with primary colors bursting on screen, La stanza accanto presents numerous pictorial, literary, and of course, cinematic references.
Central to the story is Edward Hopper’s painting People in the Sun, featured in one of the flashbacks, along with Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. On a table, there is a glimpse of a catalog from a Diane Arbus exhibition, a photographer tormented by her human and artistic sensitivity who, like Dora Carrington and George Sanders—the male protagonist of Journey to Italy—committed suicide. Journey to Italy is the film the two friends plan to watch together, and its female lead, Ingrid Bergman, shares a name with Julianne Moore’s character. There are also references to Buster Keaton, Dubliners (both the book and John Huston’s film), Letter from an Unknown Woman by Ophüls, and aesthetic allusions to Bergman’s Persona and Hitchcock’s Vertigo—a kaleidoscope of beautiful things to do, watch, and experience before dying.
There are also references to the troubled current times, starting with a personal trainer who can no longer touch his athletes—a clear nod to the fact that Almodóvar’s cinema, especially from the past, so vibrant, erotic, provocative, and deeply human, would be difficult if not unthinkable in these times of intimacy coordinators on set. The character played by John Turturro—a former lover shared by both protagonists—offers a sharp analysis of the widespread and troubling political situation, where the lethal combination of neoliberalism and emerging right-wing forces seems destined to lead humanity toward its end. And so, in these difficult times, all that remains is to rely on art, and perhaps, as Almodóvar seems to suggest, to transform into art, because—as we cinephiles know well—just add a little fiction, and everything becomes more beautiful and bearable, even death.
Quinlan, September 4, 2024
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The Room Next Door: Almodóvar Moves Venice to Its Core and Receives a Historic 17-Minute Ovation
The Room Next Door continues the reflection on death from his previous film in a beautiful, full, and profound tribute to the craft of acting, led by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. The audience applauded for 17 minutes after the screening of the film in a historic ovation.
by Luis Martínez Venecia
Cinema is an art of contradictions. The main discovery of sound cinema was, who would have imagined, the expressive power of silence. When, tired of competing with the dull and tiny television, the major studios desperately expanded the screen to infinity, filmmakers found that no landscape could compare in depth, chasms, or torrents of pure pain (and pleasure too) to the human face. The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film (his 23rd or his first in English, depending on how you see it), celebrates every paradox that inhabits cinema (or at least many of them). It does so with restrained precision, just a step away from the enthusiasm that overflowed at the end of its screening, when the audience at the Venice Film Festival stood and applauded for 17 minutes, a historic ovation.
It’s a film about life seen through the lens of death; it’s sober to the point of agony, yet flooded with vivid colors; it’s a melodrama, by definition exuberant, yet it fits entirely within the quiet music of mourning. It promises a great love story and, unsurprisingly, delivers a pure passion transformed into the steel thread that binds two friends on the brink of every abyss. But above all, Almodóvar’s adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through is nothing less than a map—the map of the human face. And it is drawn with an admirable yet enigmatic precision.
The faces of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore map the very terrain of emotions with such clarity that they turn the screen into a mirror where we gaze and sink. And they themselves, the actresses, end up as real characters in their own fiction. They become actresses playing themselves, embodiments of an ancestral despair that speaks to us all. The constant references to The Dead, John Huston’s adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dubliners, along with the subtle appearance of Letter from an Unknown Woman, Max Ophüls’ film based on Stefan Zweig’s story, serve as clues. The Room Next Door leaves these behind for each viewer’s memory to summon their own ghosts and fears.
The story follows two friends who reunite after a long time. The first (Moore) is a novelist, and the second (Swinton) is a war reporter. One has just published a book about death, which she doesn’t understand, while the other is simply dying of cancer. What follows is a journey of recognition, salvation, guilt, and forgiveness—but also of the freedom to choose how to die.
The director, as has already been mentioned, focuses on close-ups and extreme close-ups of faces. And there, he stays—to live and to die. The entire film is presented as a study and reflection on the power of the gaze and the spoken word. The Room Next Door is built entirely around a text recited by the protagonists, who are physically close to each other yet somnambulant in their solitude. Almost in a trance. The words turn into something not so much visual as a perfectly filmable (and even flammable) imaginary material. Silence matters—the other side of what’s spoken, the shadows behind a space always lit from above. The monologues, so common in the director’s cinema, now become spaces for friendship and solace. And all of this happens as, in the best tradition of Douglas Sirk’s melodrama, the world is framed through windows and doors that define screens—screens within the cinema screen, images reflected within images. Once again, few filmmakers are as meticulous as Almodóvar in drawing the labyrinths of representation, where reality becomes entwined with fiction, and vice versa.
The result is a thematic continuation of Pain and Glory, but from a graver, more wounded, and deeper place (how much The Room Next Door resembles Talk to Her, and how much Tilda and Moore remind us of the majestic Marisa Paredes). Now, unlike in his previous film, the focus is not so much on the past life projected onto guilt (although that is present, as a daughter abandoned appears) but on that immediate and blind future that halts everything, cancels everything, and in the same way, justifies and gives meaning to everything. It could even be said that the flashbacks don’t quite fit with the frozen and perfect seriousness of the whole. The references to the Vietnam War feel more like a tourist detour and quite unnecessary. While the stories within stories in the director’s films have always served to expand what we could call the cycle of narrative life, in The Room Next Door, they feel like errors interrupting the film’s quiet, profound rhythm.
Regardless, what remains is a symphony of two faces transformed into a map so perfect that it becomes the territory itself—the territory of the soul. There is no difference between the characters and the actresses, between cinema and reality, between death and life… the map and the territory. Borges once wondered why it unsettles us when a map is included within a map, The Thousand and One Nights within the book of The Thousand and One Nights, and Don Quixote is a reader of Don Quixote, and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet. And he answered: “…if the characters in a fiction can be readers or spectators, we, their readers or spectators, can be fictitious.” Without a doubt, The Room Next Door is a film made to stir deep emotions.
El Mundo, September 3, 2024
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A love story and euthanasia according to Pedro Almodóvar: a conversation-driven melodrama that is yet another piece in his open and coherent body of work, though not without some contrived moments. Competing at Venice 81
by Lorenzo Ciofani
That death has always been a central theme in Pedro Almodóvar’s work is nothing new: melodrama, after all—the elective universe that the Spanish master has not only renewed but redefined—cannot exist without it, tied as it is to desire, and therefore to love. But never as much as in recent years—perhaps aided by the passing of time—has his confrontation with death become so intense, reconnecting with the tension between the two centuries that led to Almodóvar’s definitive international consecration.
The Room Next Door (the director’s first English-language feature, based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, and competing at Venice 81) asserts continuity with the cornerstones of that phase, most notably Talk to Her and Volver, reaffirming thematic coherence with his recent works (let’s put aside the “vulgar” detour of I’m So Excited!), all of which, in their own way, engage in an introspective exploration of the sense of an ending. From the self-reflective Broken Embraces, which heralded the mature masterpiece Pain and Glory, to Julieta, which foreshadowed in its private drama what Parallel Mothers would later expand, evoking the ghosts of an entire nation.
In confronting death, Almodóvar focuses on the living: he makes this clear with the film’s title, which points to the place where the drama of those left behind unfolds. Either overwhelmed or saved, depending on the perspective, are Martha, a war reporter named after Gellhorn, who is explicitly referenced, as well as her third husband, Ernest Hemingway (Tilda Swinton), and Ingrid, a writer of semi-autobiographical novels, named after Bergman, whose Journey to Italy poster we see displayed at Lincoln Center (Julianne Moore).
They were (and are) intimate friends, “extremely close,” as we’re told, having shared much (the underground, somewhat bohemian 1980s, when the things that mattered happened only at night—is there perhaps an analogical nod here to the post-Franco Madrid movida?) only to lose touch and then reunite, whether by chance or desire, at a crucial crossroads for one of them.
There’s no need to reveal more about the plot, but the names alone tell us a great deal. Martha carries the symbolic weight of an icon of her profession, as if she were “destined” to bear witness to something, and reveals how even a job so focused on chronicling real events can transmit something fictional. A piece that ends up in a drawer, perhaps, but the temptation of the “novelistic” (the clandestine love affair under the bombs between a war photographer and a Carmelite missionary, almost a nod to the Almodóvar of old) suggests that for her, storytelling is intertwined with reworking. The fragments of the past seem artificial, almost warning us, emphasizing how truth can be a prism, and that the perspective on a story—especially one’s own—is as inviolable as it is open to the possibility of other versions.
Ingrid, on the other hand, seems to interpret the pains of others: with that explosive name (Almodóvar directed Swinton in The Human Voice, originally performed by Anna Magnani when Roberto Rossellini was leaving her for Bergman, who would later reprise the role under Ted Kotcheff’s direction: Moore carries these spirits with her), embodying the act of living through performance. She speaks about herself (her books explore the fear of death) but not to herself, and is planning a new novel about the marriage between painter Dora Carrington and gay writer Lytton Strachey, and their friendship with Virginia Woolf (didn’t Moore also play a key role in The Hours?), without fully realizing that this story mirrors her own old ménage à trois.
These names open doors to the emotional landscapes of these two women, revealing more about them than they’re willing to share themselves. This is one of the film’s strengths: a screenplay rooted in dialogue, a melodrama of conversation rather than action, at times informative, if not outright literal. Almodóvar describes the film as “a true recital” in which “the actors really tell the story,” and this might be the most interesting key to understanding the motivations and emotions behind this production, marked by its formal elegance (cinematography by Edu Grau), where the themes constantly threaten to dominate the film, almost imprisoning it.
The theme, placed at the center by the director himself with passion and conviction, is euthanasia, depicted here as a “dignified end” when treatment becomes ineffective or even counterproductive. It’s a political film that doesn’t succumb to ideology, where the issue of personal choice emerges as an inalienable right. But more intriguing than one character’s determined resolve is exploring the doubt experienced by the other, caught between complicity and fear.
The Room Next Door is about being beside death as it approaches, heralded by pink snow (the surprises of climate change), an explicit reference to The Dead—we see images from John Huston’s final directorial effort, titled The Dead in English—and this motif recurs throughout the film. In a rather didactic conversation between Moore and John Turturro (the former third party in the triangle, now a professor and lecturer who avoids answering audience questions to not waste time he doesn’t know how to manage), the concept of solastalgia (the discomfort caused by environmental change) intersects with the aftermath of the pandemic (isn’t this expanded theatre ultimately a deluxe version of a “Covid film,” with few locations and even fewer characters?), reminding us how the anxiety about the world’s end is one of the faces of death (asking why bring new life into a world that’s ending connects to the realization that surviving with the knowledge of death is unsustainable).
In reflecting on the end, a subject that concerns everyone, Almodóvar chooses to build a world apart, seen through windows where characters and settings blur together. This is where these elite interiors, which resemble either showrooms or film sets depending on one’s perspective (production design by Inbal Weinberg), seem to come from. These are spaces where the characters wear clothing as significant in their color schemes, dimensions, fabrics, and shapes as they are in their overt expressions of high fashion (costumes by Bina Daigeler).
And such deeply reality-rooted themes unfold along an axis that’s not entirely realistic, with Swinton’s ghostly presence—capitalizing on her pale complexion and androgynous features—existing between those who remain and those who depart, and Moore’s warmer, more restless character, the only one to have interactions with others. Swinton, throughout the film, only engages with Moore, as if she were already a ghost from the past. Meanwhile, Moore interacts not only with Turturro but also with a personal trainer and a policeman (these men never meet expectations: damaged, depressed, awkward, fanatical), and in the finale, with a figure that turns out to be more surprising than expected.
The relationship between these two women is also a story of love, interrupted and then rediscovered (Letter from an Unknown Woman, allusively, is one of the films they watch together), a love that transcends the physical and reveals itself in a spiritual connection. Rather than being a final film, The Room Next Door is an open door, a new piece in a coherent body of work that not only takes a stand on the world through the lens of passion but also, in light of his recent films, attempts to bring order to chaos, reconnect broken threads, and make peace with the past in the name of hope for the future.
Cinematografo, September 2, 2024
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by Chiara Borroni
The Room Next Door is a film that’s hard to describe because it speaks for itself, with such sublime elegance and intelligence that any additional words might feel out of place. In his first feature-length film in English, Pedro Almodóvar reunites with Tilda Swinton, whom he had previously directed in that little gem The Human Voice. As in that film, he hands the movie over to her, but this time, she isn’t alone. She shares the challenge with Julianne Moore in a dynamic that takes shape and solidifies, scene after scene, through dense dialogues that flow almost seamlessly, while the bodies and faces of the two actresses fill the space in a way that brings the staging closer to chamber theater, much like in Almodóvar’s other American short, Strange Way of Life. However, while in the two shorts Almodóvar played with American stars, having fun with Cocteau and the western genre, here, with The Room Next Door, the game moves to the next level.
Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar tells the story of Martha and Ingrid, longtime friends and former colleagues at an avant-garde magazine in 1980s New York. They drifted apart, as often happens, for no specific reason—just life and work taking them in different directions. Ingrid has since become a successful writer, while Martha, a war reporter, is now gravely ill. When Ingrid learns of this, she visits Martha in the hospital, and the two reconnect.
The first part of the film is typical of Almodóvar’s storytelling: a chat between old friends catching up after years of silence turns into a narrative full of daring adventures, with flashbacks recounting wars, betrayals, fires, children, lovers, and sex. It’s life bursting forth from Martha’s stories. Pale and thin, from her hospital bed, draped in large purple and blue sweaters or wrapped in elegant dressing gowns, Martha tells Ingrid what’s happened. She seems to be doing better, leaves the hospital, and returns home, but it won’t be for long. Aware that the end is near, Martha now knows exactly what she wants: to die with dignity—with Ingrid’s help.
The adventurous stories that take the viewer out of the hospital room and into Almodóvar’s usual captivating narrative system—where stories contain other stories, suggesting yet more stories in an endless series of pop-ups that open and close, evoking the baroque and irresistible grandeur of life—give way to another phase: Martha’s planning of her own death.
Here, Almodóvar takes his first step toward sublimation. When Martha leaves the clinic and returns home, firmly determined to organize her departure, the staging becomes more streamlined, and the melodrama is quieted, defused. The tumultuous past vanishes from the images—no more flashbacks, no more stories, no more twists and turns. Instead, a clear, methodical plan emerges, surrounded by the remnants of the life from which Martha is about to depart. Furniture, objects, books, notebooks, films, photographs, boxes, envelopes, papers—everything in the house is a trace and sediment, a memory without nostalgia. The house is there, welcoming, embracing like a discreet hug. But it’s not there that Martha can die. Another house is needed, and another step in the staging toward further simplicity, further emptiness, further essentiality. Thus, Martha and Ingrid can only inhabit a new space together, an “other” space where there is no memory—minimalist but not sterile, supremely elegant and meticulously curated, where nothing is personal or familiar. Just surfaces, lines, glass panes, full and empty spaces. Here, colors can only be bold, without nuances, where doors can only be either open or closed, definitive. And here, death can become a magnificent tableau, composed with precise meticulousness at the right moment.
In these shifting spaces, in this streamlined staging, in these words that convey everything without ever feeling heavy, Almodóvar finds the culmination of a true masterpiece. It’s a lesson in cinema, in directing, in staging, in writing. The great lesson of a master who is anything but senile, but rather uniquely capable of speaking with humanity and magnificence about life and death. He speaks volumes about the strange world we live in, about dignity and rights, threats and hope, suffering and beauty, friendship and sharing, responsibility and empathy, respect and self-determination.
Cineforum, September 3, 2024
