In ‘The Room Next Door,’ Pedro Almodóvar grapples with life, love and assisted suicide
Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar's English-language feature debut, "The Room Next Door," stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as old friends who reunite as one of them prepares for death.
Late last summer, the novelist Sigrid Nunez reflected on the upcoming adaptation of her book “What Are You Going Through,” about life, death and companionship, by acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar.
“There’s a place in the book, which is really based on something someone said to me once, that watching someone die is like falling in love,” she said in an interview with Time magazine. “That was the most striking thing besides the amazing visual miracle of that film.”
The film she was referring to is Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, “The Room Next Door,” starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. The richly colored, stylized drama set in New York takes inspiration from a chapter in Nunez’s novel, during which the unnamed narrator is asked by a terminally ill friend if she would keep her company until she’s ready to end her life. But whereas the request is just one vehicle for examining human connection in the novel, Almodóvar makes it the focal point of his film about two women who become inextricably bound through an intimate encounter with death.
“I found it to be a very good dramatic situation: having two women that were very good friends in the past and, at the same time that they are recovering that relationship, are facing death in a different way,” Almodóvar told NBC News of his jumping-off point for the feature, which opens in theaters nationwide Friday after premiering at the 2024 New York Film Festival.
Rating: 5