At first glance, Pedro Almodovar’s new film, The Room Next Door, his maiden effort in English, feels quite unlike any of his previous works. Even though it is more involving than his recent shorts—The Human Voice (2020) and Strange Way of Life (2023)—it still doesn’t come across as emotionally lush and robust as his Spanish classics.
In fact, at the start, the characters, their relationships, journeys in life and interactions with each other appear to be set up and defined with a conscious sense of detachment, leaving his loyal audience at a loss. However, Almodovar does eventually draw his viewers into his world, slow and steady, armed with spectacular lead performances from Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore.
In his director’s statement for the world premiere of the film at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion award for the best film, Almodovar talked about how his initial insecurity about making a film in English vanished at the first reading of the script with Swinton and Moore.
“The language wasn’t going to be a problem, and not because I mastered English, but because of the total disposition of the whole cast to understand me and to make it easy for me to understand them,” he writes. Like most of his films, The Room Next Door is also a talkie, propelled by conversations between people.
Based on Sigrid Nunez’s book What Are You Going Through, it begins with two close friends—Ingrid (Moore) and Martha (Swinton)—meeting each other after being out of touch for long. Having known each other in their youth, they went in different directions to come far in life. Ingrid became a successful novelist, while Martha turned into a war correspondent. The reconnection, however, comes at an inopportune time with Martha at a crossroads in life.
As her predicament gets revealed, and she calls upon Ingrid to perform the most difficult task of her life, the quintessential Almodovar touches, which felt missing earlier, begin to populate the film.
At the very essence is the visual flair. Production designer Inbal Weinberg and cinematographer Edu Grau bring the trademark Almodovar imagery and grammar—the bold colour palette and vivid textures—to play in a hitherto alien context—America, more specifically Manhattan—to make it approximate the world of his films as closely as possible.
While staying true to his flamboyance, Almodovar fashions a quiet, intimate narrative to play out his favourite themes of families and friendships, how they are our biggest strengths while also being the cause of the excessive emotional baggage that often weighs us down.
As is the case in most of his films, The Room Next Door is fearlessly female. As Ingrid and Martha look back at their past and the ahead at the future, the film becomes a delectable documentation of women and their solidarities, their shared memories, longings and desires as well as the dilemmas of motherhood, that one central role they are expected to play to perfection. As Martha herself puts it, she could never be to her daughter what a mother is supposed to be. No wonder the film ends up belonging to Swinton and Moore and as Almodovar himself puts it, “the actors really tell the story”.
Almodovar manages to obliquely engage in larger contemporary debates within the personal world of the two women. He looks at the impact of war on individuals and families, with his characteristic irreverence and pugnacity, talks of sex as the best way to ward off the thoughts of death, takes on neo-liberals and the far right and asserts his loss of faith in people to do the right thing for the greater good.
But, more than anything else, The Room Next Door is perhaps his most inspirational film that talks about the power of positivity in the bleakest of times, of holding on to that one open window when all the doors appear to be getting closed.
It’s a celebration of the incredible human will and effort to stay in control of one’s destiny even at one’s most vulnerable moments. It’s about the search for self-determination and sovereignty over one’s being on the one hand and facing loss and bereavement with dignity on the other. It’s an assertion of the continuity of life in the face of the inevitability of death.