Review of “The Room Next Door” by Pedro Almodóvar

Certainly, the Spanish maestro’s latest films do not have the same madness as twenty years ago. We are far here from the euphoric maelstroms and the twisting tales of All about my mother or Talk to her.

As if the filmmaker, having reached maturity, had ended up choosing purity over baroque, seriousness over life. Limiting ourselves to its summary, The Room Next Door (Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival), in theaters this Wednesday January 8, 2025, could hold the rank of testamentary work: a woman condemned by cancer (Tilda Swinton) asks an old friend (Julianne Moore) to help end his life.

But it only takes a few minutes of film to understand that this last journey will be a solar escape filled with life impulses rather than a dark requiem.

Almodóvar sets down his bags in the United States

From the first scene, a signature in a bookstore (Moore is a novelist), New York takes on tawny colors borrowed from an Almodovarian palette as much as from the American Technicolor melodramas of the 1940s.

The director did not cross the ocean for nothing: the two women are filmed in high apartments, against a backdrop of skyscrapers. The light is golden, and, when it snows, in a sublime house where they go to retire in the forest, the flakes take on a magical appearance to the sound of James Joyce’s words.

Nothing is funereal, and in her farewell to life, Swinton’s character (a former war reporter) celebrates everything she loves and prepares to leave.

Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, an obvious complicity

Almodóvar’s twenty-fourth feature film easily passes the Bechdel test (an indicator of sexism in cinema, the test aims to evaluate the presence of women in films, and their importance in history): if the two friends talk about a former lover (John Turturro), their conversations focus on the past, filiation, literature, pleasure, illness, creation (magnificent common thread of the film)… Their words ring out in a precious and rare way .

We enter into this benevolent, complex and deep femininity. Sometimes the heroines step aside for the benefit of their performers, and it is another joy than this complicity between two virtuoso stars of the game: the queer and icy beauty of Tilda Swinton facing the fiery charm of Julianne Moore.

We cannot dream of a more beautiful testimony (Pedro Almodóvar says he is a supporter of euthanasia) on a subject which has never been as debated as in our time.

De Pedro Almodóvar, with Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro… On January 8th.