For his new film, the first filmed in English, Madrid-based filmmaker Pedro Almodovar brings together Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in a story of death and friendship. “The Room Next Door”, released on January 8, discusses the issue of euthanasia with a total absence of pathos. A refined masterpiece.
Age knows no equality. Thus we have often seen career filmmakers inevitably decline over time while others draw from the weight of the years a new lightness. At 75 years old, Pedro Almodovar finds, in Sigrid Nunez’s novel, material for a magnificent film whose astonishing beauty lies in its simplicity, its purity, its apparent calm.
The story begins in New York. Successful novelist, Ingrid (Julianne Moore) cultivates a panic fear of death when she reconnects with an old friend: Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war correspondent condemned to cancer. Martha asks Ingrid to accompany her to a house lost in the wilderness where she plans to end her life. Occupying the room next door, Ingrid shares her friend’s final days, between memories, regrets, guilt and relief.
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Miraculous sobriety
It will therefore only be a question of death to be welcomed and accepted, of accompaniment and detachment, in this “Room next door” which deals with a miraculous sobriety of a subject which is a priori heavy. And if the question of euthanasia is well raised by Almodovar (notably in a chilling scene led by a very suspicious bigoted police officer), it nevertheless remains in the background, leaving the field open to the duo of women who constitute the heart of a story free of all affectations.
Traveling together towards a death that has never seemed so sunny, so sweet, so peaceful as here, Ingrid and Martha share a bond that goes beyond love or friendship. A bond that belongs only to them, a common territory where disappearance, finitude, joins the new beginning, the handover, a territory where Martha and Ingrid fall out like the two heroines of “Persona” by Ingmar Bergman, directly cited by Almodovar. Two women played by a pair of imperial actresses, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, whose delicate tandem brings prodigious subtlety and emotion to the film.
>> Listen to Vertigo’s critical debate around the film “The Room Next Door”:
James Joyce and Edward Hopper
There will also be a lot of talk about quotation in this “Room Next Door” which summons “The People of Dublin”, the novel by James Joyce and its adaptation to the cinema by John Huston, and at times reproduces the paintings of ‘Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth.
But Almodovar’s genius is to elude the vain temptation of simple reference to immerse his characters in these paintings, images, these texts, as if Martha and Ingrid literally inhabited the world of Hopper, Joyce and Huston, as if life and art, the past and the present, the living and the dead, merged here with a grace and a moving delicacy.
And when the moment arrives where Martha prepares to leave the world in a yellow dress, applying bright red to her lips, we no longer have any problem talking about “The Room Next Door” as the first masterpiece work of 2025.
Rafael Wolf/eye
“The Room Next Door” by Pedro Almodovar, with Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro. To be seen in French-speaking cinemas since January 8, 2025.
