The Room Next Door review – Almodóvar spins a gorgeous, fragile tale of life and death

Venice film festival
The Spanish director’s first English-language feature sees Tilda Swinton’s dying journalist trying to reconnect with an old friend played by Julianne Moore

Pedro Almodóvar’s death-struck new melodrama – the great director’s 23rd feature but his first in the English language – is a hothouse Spanish shrub transplanted to stony foreign soil. It wilts and it droops; it almost gives up the ghost. Then when it flowers it feels like a small miracle. The film’s very fragility is what makes it so gorgeous.

Tilda Swinton plays Martha, a driven former war correspondent now dying of cervical cancer and keen to reconnect with an old friend, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), who has latterly become a writer of acclaimed autofiction. Martha and Ingrid were once colleagues on a hip New York magazine and briefly shared a Philip Rothian lover, Damian (John Turturro), but they haven’t seen each other in years; their lives have spun them down different paths. When Martha asks Ingrid to be at her side when she takes a euthanasia pill, the author recoils. “Don’t you want someone closer?” she asks, which cuts Ingrid to the quick. At the end of life, perhaps, we cling to whoever happens to be closest at hand.

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