The Room Next Door review – Pedro Almodóvar puts friendship and assisted dying in laser-focus

A new Pedro Almodóvar movie is always something to relish. The shock-haired Spanish sensualist embraces emotionally charged drama, bold colours, sex, history, politics, classic cinema… all the good stuff. Almodóvar also loves to centre women in many of his screen stories, and has been such a productive film-maker since the 1980s that even if a recent effort does not set fireworks off in your brain, another will be along shortly. 

His latest arrives in the UK after triumphing at the Venice Film Festival, where it took home the Golden Lion (in my initial draft, I typed “Golden Loin” – make of that what you will). Helpfully for such a prolific artist, it also comes with a new marketing angle: The Room Next Door is Almodóvar’s first full-length English-language feature. 

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In recent years he has tested the waters with half-hour films in English, starting with the 2020 lockdown project The Human Voice, featuring Tilda Swinton as a recently dumped celebrity eyeing the sharper implements in a hardware store with vengeful intensity. He followed that up last year with gay cowboy fable Strange Way of Life, starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as lovers awkwardly saddling up again after 25 years.

From there, it perhaps does not feel like too much of a leap to a full movie. The Room Next Door is Pedro Almodóvar’s own adaptation of US author Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through. It is the story of two women who bonded when they were journalists working hard and partying harder in the Big Apple in the extravagant 1980s. Martha (Swinton, back again) went on to become a hard-charging war correspondent covering conflicts in Bosnia, Iraq and more. But we first meet her laid out in a New York hospital bed, dealing with the debilitating after-effects of optimistic treatment for an aggressive cancer.

Her former colleague Ingrid (Julianne Moore), now a novelist, re-enters Martha’s life at this momentous inflection point. Despite, or perhaps because of, the stressful circumstances, the two rekindle their bond. They reminisce about the old days, ruefully discuss regrets – Martha’s relationship with the daughter she had as a teen is non-existent – and grapple with the encroaching shadow of death.

Then the terminally ill Martha floats her big idea. She wants to go out on her own terms, with the help of a killer pill dubiously sourced online. Ingrid has become so entangled in her friend’s life that she feels obliged to help with her death, even though it could put her at risk of prosecution. 

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The pair head for a remote but luxurious upstate rental property with breathtaking views of nature. It has been booked for a month but Martha fully intends to check out early. A sombre signal is agreed upon: when Ingrid rises and sees her friend’s bedroom door is closed, it means Martha will have chosen to end things.

That probably makes it sound rather grim but, as with all of Almodóvar’s work, The Room Next Door is bursting with humanity. Some of the early scenes feel unexpectedly stodgy but the poised Swinton and empathetic Moore help smooth over the more expository dialogue until the highly charged push-pull of their friendship takes over. (Almodóvar himself has described it as “love, but without love’s inconveniences”.)

Such is the laser focus on the central relationship that there is barely room for anyone else. John Turturro has a handful of scenes as a former lover of both Martha and Ingrid who still carries a torch for the latter and finds himself secretly sworn into the pact. Turturro is warm, supportive and enjoyably flirtatious but he thinks Martha is fully justified in choosing to die because the world will end soon anyway due to climate change.

At times, it feels like an idealised, almost abstract treatise in favour of assisted dying, not least because Martha and Ingrid enjoy lives of such privilege that they can literally relocate to what is essentially a fairytale castle in some enchanted woods. That sense of heightened reality is underlined by a very theatrical late casting flourish that is surprising but also thematically effective.

Should Almodóvar, who turned 75 last month, continue in this new English mode? It seems almost unnecessary as he has spent decades teaching global audiences fluency in his own very personal cinematic language. But I’m happy to let him choose how he goes on, or goes out.

The Room Next Door is in cinemas from 25 October.

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