There is something profoundly surreal about watching Pedro Almodóvar drift away from his roots and attempt a bold venture like making a film in English with two of the most cerebral actresses in contemporary cinema, Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton. It’s a bit like seeing a bullfighter abandon the plaza and try to waltz in Vienna. It’s not just a matter of language — though the language here weighs heavily on every scene — but of sensitivity, rhythm, and that colorful, brazen theatricality that Almodóvar once transformed into emotional reality. In The Room Next Door, all this is diluted, like a watered-down sangria in a crystal glass too refined to contain it.
The main issue is the excess of words — not the vibrant and pulsating words Almodóvar uses when writing in Spanish, but lines that seem tweezed out of a novel. The script, adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through, bears the stifling weight of literature that cannot break free onto the screen. Moore and Swinton struggle with dialogue that sounds both awkward and pompous, making the film feel more like a staged reading than a cinematic work. Almodóvar’s gift for letting the unspoken flow, for exploring silences, gestures, and small moments that reveal his characters’ souls, seems absent. Here, everything is explained and verbalized, resulting in a rigid narrative that stifles the film.
This approach clashes violently with the essence of the protagonists. Tilda Swinton is a master of subtlety, capable of expressing an entire tragedy with just a look or a facial movement. But here, she’s asked to deliver pages of dialogue, resulting in a performance that feels sterilized and restrained, as if she’s acting with the brakes on. Julianne Moore, who usually humanizes even the strangest situations, seems uncomfortable, trapped in a script that gives her little room to breathe and discover truth in the most intimate moments.
Yet, visually, the film is a catalog of Almodóvar’s signature beauty: saturated colors, clashing reds and greens, interiors resembling Hopper paintings reinterpreted with a warmer, more sensual touch. But unlike his best films, here the aesthetics are purely decorative. In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or Talk to Her, the use of color was part of the narrative language, a vehicle of emotion. In The Room Next Door, everything feels static, like a series of well-photographed postcards devoid of life. Even the digital New York backdrops are so artificial they resemble cutouts from a stage set. Where are those visual explosions that overwhelm and immerse you in Almodóvar’s world without explanation?
The plot, meant to be an intimate and painful reflection on death and the choice of euthanasia, follows predictable and often tedious paths. Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a writer of autofiction, and Martha (Tilda Swinton), a terminally ill former war reporter, reconnect after years apart under extreme circumstances: Martha asks Ingrid to accompany her in assisted suicide. There’s potential here, the kind that Almodóvar could have turned into an explosion of conflicting emotions. But what we get is a series of conversations weighed down by a sense of inevitability and mechanical fatalism.
Themes of rediscovered friendship and choosing a dignified death are tackled with an almost academic coldness. The moments meant to strike deep chords are lost in a sea of words. The relationship between the two women, which should be the heart of the film, never fully convinces. It’s as if intimacy is only suggested, never truly experienced. Even John Turturro, playing Damian, a former companion of both, feels like a footnote in a story unsure of what to do with him.
The saddest feeling is witnessing a director who has lost his way, betraying himself in an attempt to broaden his horizons. Almodóvar has always been a storyteller rooted in an imagined, visceral Spain, a place where melodrama meets the absurd and pain is always tinged with irreverent joy. Here, in this English-speaking territory, that joy has vanished. All that remains is an empty shell, a stylistic exercise lacking soul and spontaneity.
Almodóvar tried to build a room next to his cinematic home, but that room remains empty. Perhaps it’s time to return home and rediscover what makes his cinema unique: the ability to blend the sublime with the ridiculous, pain with ecstasy, without ever descending into the banal.
