Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is a beloved name associated with his feats in cinema, which are loving portraits of strong, vulnerable (never fragile), irascible women. Room Next Door (2024) is Almodóvar’s first foray into English-language filmmaking as both writer and director, with Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton as two friends who deal with death in their writings.
Moore (Ingrid) writes fiction that defies the eventuality of death or instead examines the lumbering steps leading to demise. Swinton (Martha) is a New York Times war correspondent who witnesses deaths and excesses. This establishes the basic framework of the film: symmetry.
What makes symmetry an aesthetic choice of engagement is that it operates upon parallelisms (when points do not meet) and perpendicularity (when points do meet). For so long, Ingrid and Martha lived parallel lives, engaged with other deaths, such as lost loves. Between the two, Swinton’s Martha has a more visceral encounter with death—not just as actual mortality but as the thoughts borne out of the violence of evisceration.
Almodóvar’s tinges of queerness are very much in play throughout these vignettes. There is the presence of hirsute, burly men who act as pivots of philosophical emanations. Among his works, The Room Next Door is the darkest and least humorous. Almodóvar’s darkness is evident in Habla con Ella (Talk to Her), Carne Trémula (Live Flesh), or even La Mala Educación (Bad Education), but The Room Next Door leans more toward dour comparative misery.
The two main characters use their mindsets to discuss certain visual artists. Moore’s character speaks of the British painter Dora Carrington, who fell in love with the writer Lytton Strachey, an avowed homosexual.
Swinton notices a painting she thinks might be an Edward Hopper. These two artists are parallel in that they lived through the same timeline. They are also perpendicular in their paintings, as both deal with loneliness—she in lush landscapes, and he in planar arrangements between built environments.
There is scant campness associated with Almodóvar. Is it because this film is in English that the notably spiked campiness of his other works is missing? There is no whimsy in this film, but it is beautifully framed. What makes this truly an Almodóvar film is its aesthetic.
Produced by his brother and famed collaborator, Agustín Almodóvar, you can see the thumbprints of these two in the bolts of color that lovingly caress the screen. You can see this in how the two characters are dressed: redheaded Moore is often in bright, warm shades of red, green, and orange, whereas the sleek platinum blonde Swinton is in metal greys, blues, and subdued lilac. If you are genuinely observant and knowledgeable of Almodóvar, you know that something is up when there is a change in the embodiment of color, and the cadence of the film slows down into an almost mournful sigh.
Without the garish humor and the overt narrative shifts, the production design reminds you of the strength of the Almodóvars. Even within a New York City hospital, the stark colors of orange and blue frame the window, showing the skyline with soft, falling pink snow.
It is a glorious debut into English filmmaking, and I commend Pedro Almodóvar for still having the wherewithal to write such lilting prose with such emotional heft. How can you argue with somebody telling you to shake your depression off when they say, “You can’t be self-possessed if you’re in agony.”
Now, that is a bolt of color amidst death.
You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social