The Room Next Door (2024)

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

This may be the first Pedro Almodóvar film that really disappointed me. Not because it’s badly made, Almodóvar doesn’t know how to make an ugly film, and The Room Next Door has his usual rich visuals, the gorgeous color palette, the meticulous design. But on the whole, it lacked the probing emotional intensity we associate with him. For a director who built his reputation on raw feeling, on characters whose emotions spill out messy and uncontained, this felt restrained to the point of distance.

The film follows Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton), two friends who reconnect after years apart when Martha, dying of cancer, asks Ingrid to stay in the room next door while she chooses to end her life. It’s Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, based on Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, and it tackles a subject that cinema has explored with more urgency elsewhere: La Mar Dentro with Javier Bardem’s brilliant portrayal, Amour (2012), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, even Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby which dropped this question into its finale. All of those films had something this one doesn’t: they made you feel the weight of the choice, the desperation or the clarity or the love that drives someone to choose death over continued suffering.

Moore and Swinton were quite beyond incredible in their portrayals. They bring intelligence, nuance, and a deep understanding of these women to every scene. The problem isn’t the performances; it’s that the film around them never quite matches their commitment. Almodóvar seems more interested in surfaces than depths here, more concerned with how things look than how they feel.

I suspect that since baby boomers are now approaching the age of these questions, we might see a few more films exploring dying with dignity. That’s not a bad thing; these conversations need to happen. But when Almodóvar, of all directors, makes a film about death and friendship that feels emotionally muted, something has gone wrong. This is a beautiful film that kept me at arm’s length when I wanted to be devastated.