Review: Arthouse titans unite in “The Room Next Door”

By Jay Collura     1/28/25 11:27pm

Score: ★★★½

Are there two better working actors than Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton? Perhaps, but it’s hard to find a pair of actors who have better taste. Moore has worked with a murderer’s row of American auteurs (Paul Thomas Anderson, Todd Haynes, Robert Altman). Swinton has seemingly worked with every significant arthouse filmmaker working today (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jim Jarmusch Luca Guadagnino, Bela Tarr). 

“The Room Next Door” in a sense, feels like the natural meeting point of both Moore and Swinton’s artful proclivities, as the two are given the space to finally meet under the direction of the esteemed Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar. Their collective interest in seeking out the singular has led them to a project that is just that - a film that is strange and stilted, yet familiar and entirely natural.

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Almodóvar’s latest (and first fully English project) follows two writers, Ingrid (Moore) and Martha (Swinton), who have rekindled an old friendship after Martha falls terminally ill. The film follows the two’s reblossoming connection as they confront their relationships with each other, the world around them, and their own mortality. 

As the film progresses, various vignettes and interactions are shown to the audience, revealing moments in the character’s pasts and hinting at what their futures may hold. The film becomes a space for Almodóvar to effectively exercise his thoughts on decay and the state of our world, and to hold a conversation with the audience about life itself, speaking to its little joys and the unflinching, darker realities behind them.

If this sounds interesting to you, “The Room Next Door” is worth watching. It functions best as a discussion when Moore and Swinton are given the space to bounce off of each other. Swinton’s colder on-screen persona and Moore’s more optimistic style are metatextual, making it so even if you don’t have a complete knowledge of who these characters are, you can understand where they come from. Almodóvar very astutely draws on this, and it makes every conversation between the two engaging.

Visually, the film also sharply connects to life itself by spotlighting the smaller pleasures. The bright colors make everything vibrant as if you are viewing reality for the first time. Images are framed similarly, forcing the audience to slow down as the characters learn to themselves. Almodóvar and his team are all on the same page, locked into constructing a clever dialogue between the characters and the audience.

However, this conversation is one I had heard before, which, in my mind, is the film’s greatest shortcoming. Nothing posited to me felt fully unique; each new concept was echoed by memories of other movies that have told me similar things. When Almodóvar’s script does attempt to modernize these concepts, the dialogue is often clunky and awkward. Climate change, for example, becomes a motif, but whenever a character monologues about it, they sound like an internet post rather than an adult person.

This clumsiness creeps its way into the film and breaks the viewer’s concentration. As soon as the film starts to become revelatory, a line of dialogue just doesn’t quite land. The film is still saying something, it just never finds all the words to say what it’s hinting at.

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