Review: The Room Next Door (2024)

Five decades into his career, Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar seems to be thinking about the end more than usual. But, like the characters in his first English-language film, The Room Next Door, he’s resolved to make the most of the time he has left. 

Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, a novelist who has chosen to confront her debilitating fear of death in her latest literary sensation. When she learns at a book signing that her former best friend and lauded war correspondent, Martha (Tilda Swinton) is on the cusp of succumbing to a brutal bout with Stage 4 cancer, she drops everything for a hospital visit. As Ingrid rekindles a friendship grown stale after their heyday as the gadflys of the NYC magazine world, Martha makes an offer: accompany her on a month-long country vacation, stay in the room next door, and alert the authorities when she feels the moment is right to take a black-market suicide pill so she can die on her own terms. 

From such a seemingly nihilistic premise, Almodóvar fashions a vibrant celebration of life without ever descending into the saccharine. Though he rivals Wes Anderson in his knack for lusciously over-the-top set design, Almodóvar is also a savvy enough filmmaker to lean into the type of nuance only performers of Moore and Swinton’s caliber could achieve. 

Both Ingrid and Martha are saddled with guilt over the insular urban worlds they have built for themselves. But they rebuff succumbing to the catastrophizing around them—an air of doom and gloom Almodóvar excoriates with an assist from John Turturro’s turn as a sexagenarian celebrity climate scientist who can’t quite get over his romantic pasts with Ingrid and Martha. As the film reaches its quietly hopeful conclusion, The Room Next Door proves itself the rare arthouse movie that fervently believes there’s still some goodness left in the way we live now. 

The Room Next Door opens in theaters Friday.