THE ROOM NEXT DOOR Trailer (2024) Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, Pedro Almodóvar

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR Trailer (2024) Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, Pedro Almodóvar

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR Trailer (2024) Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, Drama Movie
© 2024 - Sony Pictures

The first footage from Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” starring Oscar winners Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, is here.

Sony Pictures Classics dropped a teaser trailer on Tuesday for the film, which marks Almodóvar’s first English-language feature and is set to premiere in competition at Venice Film Festival on Sept. 2. According to its synopsis, “The Room Next Door” follows Ingrid (Moore) and Martha (Swinton), who were close friends in their youth when they worked at the same magazine.

“Ingrid went on to become an autofiction novelist while Martha became a war reporter, and they were separated by the circumstances of life,” the description continues. “After years of being out of touch, they meet again in an extreme but strangely sweet situation.”

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In the clip, Swinton is seen in a hospital bed with Moore at her side as dramatic music plays. The two go on to inhabit the same home and must navigate their resumed friendship, with Moore seeming to be much more interested in doing so than Swinton.

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“The Room Next Door” is Almodóvar’s follow-up to 2021’s “Parallel Mothers,” which also bowed at Venice and scored the fest’s best actress Volpi Cup for Penelope Cruz’s performance. The film is among a stellar competition lineup at this year’s Venice Film Festival, which includes Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” Pablo Larrain’s “Maria” and Todd Phillips’ “Joker: Folie à Deux,” among others.

After its Venice premiere, “The Room Next Door” will open in theaters Dec. 20 from Sony Pictures Classics.

Watch the teaser trailer for “The Room Next Door” below.

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The legendary Spanish director has taken his signature style to the US for this "sweetly heartfelt reflection on ageing and dying" featuring two knockout performances.

After four-and-a-half decades of making rapturously acclaimed Spanish-language films, Pedro Almodóvar has written and directed his first ever feature-length film in English. And he could hardly have chosen two better actors to be in it. Adapted from a novel by Sigrid Nunez, The Room Next Door stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, both of whom are dazzling, even by their own brilliant standards.

Their characters are Ingrid (Moore) and Martha (Swinton), two old friends who were magazine journalists in New York in the 1980s. Ingrid has gone on to be an author, her latest novel being about her fear of death, while Martha has had a long career as a daredevil war reporter. They lost touch a few years earlier, but when Ingrid hears that Martha is being treated for cervical cancer in a Manhattan hospital, she rushes to her bedside, and they are soon as close as ever. They become so close, in fact, that the alarmingly pale and skeletal Martha asks Ingrid to do her a monumental favour. She has found a euthanasia pill on the dark web, but she doesn't want to be alone when she takes it. She wants Ingrid to be in the room next door.

If you've seen an Almodóvar film before, you'll be able to spot his signatures: no other director uses those deep greens, reds, yellows and blues – and few directors would dare have so many Spanish nationals cropping up at random in and around New York. Still, if you didn't know any better, you might also assume that Woody Allen was involved. Given that the film is a talky drama about cultured, comfortably well-off New Yorkers who stroll around parks discussing love, life, sex and death, it's a comparison that's impossible to avoid.

The Room Next Door isn't a weighty philosophical work – as mature as it is, it still has glimmers of cheeky humour and campy melodrama
But The Room Next Door is more like one of Allen's recent films than his early or mid-period ones, in that the dialogue can be so stilted it sets your teeth on edge. When Martha mentions her estranged daughter, for instance, she says: "By puberty, she had carved out quite an abyss between us. It defined her adolescence." Almodóvar has an excuse for such verbose exposition, as English isn't his first language, but there are stretches of the film which made me wish that it was in Spanish instead.

The Room Next Door

Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Cast: Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro

Run time: 1hr 50m

As it is, The Room Next Door has the air of a low-budget off-Broadway play: a two-hander that has been fleshed out only slightly for the big screen. But, again, it's a two-hander starring Moore and Swinton, and if anyone can breathe life into inert dialogue, they can. Moore is especially deft at taking phrases that would be portentous coming from anyone else, and putting so much strain and uncertainty into her voice that they sound like something a reasonable human being might way.

Even so, the stodgy first half of The Room Next Door can be tough to wade through, but it grows more and more winning after the characters leave New York behind. Martha rents an impossibly expensive, sculptural house in the mountains for a month-long "vacation", and as her last day on Earth approaches, her friendship with Ingrid becomes warmer, happier and more poignant. Meanwhile, John Turturro deepens the film’s themes as an ex-boyfriend of both women who now lectures on the horrors of the climate crisis. And Alessandro Nivola adds some jeopardy as a police detective who loathes suicide for religious reasons.

Almodóvar, now aged 74, has clearly been thinking a lot about mortality. The Room Next Door isn't a weighty philosophical work – as mature as it is, it still has glimmers of cheeky humour and campy melodrama. But it develops into a sweetly heartfelt reflection on ageing, dying, and whether or not it's healthy to find joy in the most desperate of circumstances. There aren't too many films like that in any language.
For Pedro Almodovar’s first English-language film, The Room Next Door—which just won the Golden Lion at Venice—the writer-director found himself on the exact same page as Tilda Swinton well before they started shooting.

Almodovar had worked before with Swinton on The Human Voice (2020), and sent her the script for The Room Next Door, asking who should be the actress opposite her. “I remembering him saying, ‘Who do you think should play Ingrid?’” Swinton said at Deadline’s studio at the Toronto Film Festival. “There was one person, and only one person in my mind. And I sent him an email with one name on it and he sent me one back, which crossed, and it was the same name.”

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That name was Julianne Moore. In the film, Moore plays Ingrid, a successful writer asked to support her friend Martha (Swinton), a former war reporter, through a terminal illness and end-of-life decisions.

“I was intrigued by her because this depiction of female friendship is so unusual in film,” Moore said. “I think often we see a lot of familial relationships, we see a lot of romantic relationships, but something that’s so quotidian, that’s so normal in our lives, which is having a friend, being with a friend, a female friend, is very rarely explored, so I was so touched by it. And that idea that what you do for a friend is to witness their life, to be there for them.”

Working with Almodóvar is a unique kind of filmmaking experience, Swinton said, moving at a breakneck speed. “The thing about Pedro is he works unbelievably fast and that is a challenge, because it was a feat of faith, faith in us really. We had to really dig deep to go, ‘Really? You don’t want to see what else I could do with this? You’re clear and you want to move on?’ We finished it incredibly fast. The film was cut by the time we finished shooting. I know that sounds almost impossible but it’s Pedro-world, and that’s what happens with Pedro.”

For Moore, she found a new perspective on Almodovar’s inner world and his oeuvre. “I hadn’t realized until I walked into his apartment how autobiographical all of his work is. Honestly the very first time I went in and we read the script, I saw that red kitchen and I thought, ‘I’ve seen that red kitchen in so many movies.’ It’s like I saw his whole life. I saw every film in that apartment… I thought he sees things very, very specifcially. He’s already pre-viz-ed it in a way. And that became clear to us with each and every thing we did, just in terms of the language, the way we were dressed, how he wanted our hair to be, it’s very personal to him.”

“It’s almost as if he’s seen the film,” Swinton added. “He’s the only person that’s seen the film and he’s coming to the set every day to tell us what happens in this scene, not what could happen, he’s already seen the film and he’s reporting back from the front…. So you roll with it, and for good reason.”

The Room Next Door also stars John Turturro and Alessandro Nivola, is produced by Augustín Almodóvar and Esther García, and distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.

Click the video above to see the interview.

Deadline Studio at TIFF is sponsored by Final Draft.

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Pedro Almodóvar’s highly anticipated English-language debut, The Room Next Door, has been unveiled with a first-look teaser from Sony Pictures Classics. The film, starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, is set to make its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival this month before heading to the New York Film Festival for its U.S. debut.

Pedro Almodóvar, Sean Baker and Payal Kapadia to make a stop at New York Film Festival 2024

The Room Next Door tells the story of Ingrid, portrayed by Moore, a best-selling author who reconnects with her old friend Martha, a war journalist played by Swinton. As the two women delve into their shared past, Martha makes a request that challenges their deepening bond. The cast also includes John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola, and Juan Diego Botto, adding depth to the film’s exploration of complex relationships.

The movie tackles themes of war’s relentless cruelty and the contrasting ways Ingrid and Martha, both writers, confront reality, death, friendship, and sexual pleasure—elements that serve as their weapons against the horrors they face. The film is said to capture a “sweet awakening,” set against the serene backdrop of a house in a New England nature reserve where the two women find themselves in an intense and oddly tender situation.

‘All About My Mother’ movie review: Almodóvar’s heartbreaking tale about mothers at the margins

Warner Bros Pictures has secured distribution rights for The Room Next Door across several key international markets, including Almodóvar’s native Spain, the UK, Germany, Italy, and various regions in Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

Produced by Almodóvar’s El Deseo, the film was shot across locations in Madrid and New York, with the backing of Movistar Plus+. This marks Almodóvar’s first feature-length project since his 2021 film Parallel Mothers, which also premiered at Venice and garnered Penelope Cruz the Best Actress Volpi Cup.
Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton explore a uniquely close relationship in their latest drama.

On Aug. 20, Sony Pictures Classics debuted the first teaser trailer for The Room Next Door, from director Pedro Almodóvar, the Oscar winner who previously made Parallel Mothers, The Skin I Live In and more. It's the filmmaker's first movie filmed entirely in English.

In the film, Moore plays Ingrid and Swinton is Martha, "who were close friends in their youth, when they worked together at the same magazine," per a synopsis.

"Ingrid went on to become an autofiction novelist while Martha became a war reporter, and they were separated by the circumstances of life. After years of being out of touch, they meet again in an extreme but strangely sweet situation."

John Turturro also stars in the film, which will be showcased at the upcoming Venice Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival.

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SONY PICTURES CLASSICS TO RELEASE THE ROOM NEXT DOOR starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.
Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in "The Room Next Door". Sony Pictures Classics
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At the premiere of her movie Problemista in February, Swinton told PEOPLE that The Room Next Door is a "really delicate" story "about adults facing tricky adult things about friendship."

"It's really about good, good friends and what good friends do for each other," she added at the time.

SONY PICTURES CLASSICS TO RELEASE THE ROOM NEXT DOOR starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.
Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in "The Room Next Door". Sony Pictures Classics
Swinton, 63, also shared her excitement in getting to work with fellow Oscar winner Moore, 63.

"We've actually met a couple of times over the years. We've always wanted to hang out more and more. And the best way of hanging out with someone you like is to work with them. And now we're together and we're loving it," she said at the time.

The Room Next Door is in select theaters Dec. 20, then everywhere Dec. 25.
Characters die in movies every day. Whether you’re watching a violent thriller or a death-bed tearjerker like “Steel Magnolias” or some of the more macabre meditations of Ingmar Bergman, you might say that the movies, in some grand collective way, are nothing less than a rehearsal for death. Yet it’s still rare to encounter a big-screen drama that grabs death by the horns, that looks it in the eye, that asks us to confront its daunting reality on every level the way Pedro Almodóvar’s lyrical and moving “The Room Next Door” does.

The movie, in form, is quite simple. It’s about two women, both in their early 60s, who’ve been friends for a long time but haven’t seen each other in years: Ingrid (Julianne Moore), an art-world author based in New York City, and Martha (Tilda Swinton), a former globe-trotting war correspondent for the New York Times who Ingrid reconnects with when she learns that Martha is in the hospital fighting a battle with cancer. Her illness is serious: It’s stage-three cervical cancer, and she’s undergoing a highly experimental immunotherapy treatment, which is the only chance she has. (In other words, not much of one.)

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Some people in this situation might not choose to vent their feelings, but Martha isn’t like that. She knows she may die, and she’s frank and open and philosophical about it. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. She and Ingrid, we can see, were once close — and after a few catch-up encounters, they still are. The movie, while it has a sprinkling of other characters (like the man they both dated, a climate-change doomsayer played by John Turturro), is essentially a two-hander, a series of conversations between the two women that could almost be taking place on stage.

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Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 American novel, “What Are You Going Through,” into his first English-language feature, Almodóvar has made a movie full of dialogue that has a ripe expository fervor. “The Room Next Door” is no mock Almodóvar soap opera, but it does have his love of voluble communication, of flamboyant feelings laid bare. The characters explain who they are, putting themselves right out there. Early on, Martha tells the story of how she wound up estranged from her daughter, Michelle, who she’d raised as a young single mother, and this wrenching flashback (set in the Vietnam era) is like a mini-movie all its own.

“The Room Next Door” is vibrantly shot (by Eduard Grau), notably when the characters move to a fancy modernist rented vacation home in the upstate country near Woodstock, NY. Mostly, though, it’s a movie in which Martha and Ingrid talk about death, and Martha finally figures out what she’s going to do about it. She has not stopped wanting to live. But she has grown tired of fighting the fear that she’s going to die.

Tilda Swinton has always had a face so distinctive — pale and severe, expressive in a way that’s almost translucent, with that aura she conjures of looking like the aristocratic elfin alien sibling of David Bowie — that we feel as if we know that face like our own. In “The Room Next Door,” Swinton’s face, along with her words, becomes an awesome instrument of inquiry. She gives a monumental performance, one that in its raw emotion, its pensive power, is worthy of comparison to the spirit and virtuosity of Vanessa Redgrave. She makes Martha a grounded woman who knows herself, and knows what she wants, but has landed in uncharted territory. She’s not prepared for this. Who is, really? But she’s going to take the journey and take us with her.

At a certain point, Martha decides that she’s had enough, and that she’s going to seize control of her destiny. She’s going to decide when she dies. “The Room Next Door” is not an “issue” movie (though it’s very much on the side of euthanasia). It’s a deceptively plainspoken but artful voyage into the river of emotion that accompanies the impulse to end one’s life. Martha has a plan, and it’s a relatively simple one, though it involves a pill she had to obtain, with some difficulty, on the dark web. And the challenge hardly ends there. As she and Ingrid move into the upstate home, a timetable emerges, and it infuses the film with a reality-based suspense. Will Ingrid wake up to find Martha’s bedroom door closed? That’s the code they’ve agreed on for the day of Martha’s reckoning. Moore’s Ingrid, warm and empathetic, will do whatever it takes to support her friend, which makes her part of a spiritual-ethical equation. She’s there to protect Martha, though she herself also needs to be protected (from the law).

Pedro Almodóvar, at 74, is no Spanish fatalist, but his films have become increasingly haunted by death. That’s why the comedy in them has mostly been burned away. Yet I would argue that this has not made him a downbeat artist. “The Room Next Door,” as driven by the scalding humanity of Swinton’s performance, lifts you up and delivers a catharsis. The movie is all about death, yet in the unblinking honesty with which it confronts that subject, it’s powerfully on the side of life.

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The Room Next Door (Spanish: La habitación de al lado) is a 2024 Spanish drama film written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar in his English-language full-length debut based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez.[1] It stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore alongside John Turturro and Alessandro Nivola.

The film premiered on 2 September 2024 at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where it was awarded with the Golden Lion, a first for a Spanish film.[2] The film is scheduled to be released in Spain on 18 October 2024.

Plot
The plot deals with the rift between Martha, a very imperfect mother and war correspondent, and her resentful daughter, as well as with the former's relationship with author Ingrid.[3][4]

Cast
Tilda Swinton as Martha[3]
Julianne Moore as Ingrid[3]
John Turturro[4]
Alessandro Nivola[5]
Juan Diego Botto[5]
Melina Matthews[5]
Raúl Arévalo[5]
Victoria Luengo[5]
Esther McGregor[6]
Alex Høgh Andersen[6]
Alvise Rigo[6]
Production
Almodóvar talked about plans to shoot an English-language film set in New York City on the eve of his trip to the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.[7] The title The Room Next Door was advertised in late 2023.[8] In January 2024, El Deseo announced that Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton had been cast in the lead roles, with John Turturro as another cast member.[4] Swinton described the film as "a natural successor, strangely, to Pain and Glory".[9] The film is an El Deseo production with the participation of Movistar Plus+.[10] Filming began on 3 March 2024 in Madrid.[3] Alessandro Nivola joined the cast that same month.[11] Shooting locations also included New York City.[12] On 12 June 2024, Juan Diego Botto, Raúl Arévalo, Melina Matthews, and Victoria Luengo were announced as additional cast members.[13] Edu Grau was the film's cinematographer.[14]

Release

Swinton, Almodóvar, and Moore at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.
In advance of the start of production, Almodóvar's recurring North American distributor Sony Pictures Classics picked up rights to the film in North America, the Middle East, India, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.[15]

The film is scheduled to be released theatrically in Spain on 18 October 2024 by Warner Bros. Pictures.[5] Warner Bros. also acquired distribution rights for the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, the Nordics, Central and Eastern Europe (excluding Poland), Latin America and some territories in Asia-Pacific, including Japan.[16] It will be made available on Movistar Plus+ in Spain after its theatrical window.[17]

In July 2024, the film was reportedly likely to premiere at the 81st Venice International Film Festival;[18] this was confirmed a week later, with the film announced to be premiering in competition.[19] Alberto Barbera reported that the film was premiering during the festival's second half.[20] The film will also be screened at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival (for its North American premiere),[21] as a 'Donostia Award' screening at the 72nd San Sebastián International Film Festival,[22] and as the Centerpiece selection of the 62nd New York Film Festival at the Alice Tully Hall on 4 October 2024 (for its U.S. premiere).[1]

It is scheduled to open theatrically in New York City and Los Angeles on 20 December 2024, followed by a limited release in select US cities on Christmas Day, and a January 2025 wide US release.[23]

Reception

Pedro Almodóvar holding the Golden Lion won by The Room Next Door at the Venice International Film Festival
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 95% of 41 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.4/10.[24] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 70 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[25]

Accolades
Award Ceremony date Category Recipient(s) Result Ref.
Venice International Film Festival 7 September 2024 Golden Lion The Room Next Door Won [26]
Brian Award Won [27][28]
See also
List of Spanish films of 2024

Tilda Swinton is reuniting with auteur Pedro Almodóvar for his English-language feature debut.

Swinton, who starred in Almodóvar’s short film “The Human Voice,” plays a dying journalist who reunites with her old friend (Julianne Moore). The official synopsis reads: Ingrid (Moore) and Martha (Swinton) were close friends in their youth, when they worked together at the same magazine. Ingrid went on to become an autofiction novelist while Martha became a war reporter, and they were separated by the circumstances of life. After years of being out of touch, they meet again in an extreme but strangely sweet situation.

John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola, and Juan Diego Botto also star.

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The feature is adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel “What Are You Going Through,” and while filmed in Madrid, is instead centered on Almodóvar’s “career-long fascination with the lives of women for an American vernacular, capturing Manhattan and upstate New York with enraptured affection,” as a description reads.

“The Room Next Door” will debut at the Venice Film Festival, and later screen at TIFF and NYFF as a Centerpiece showcase. This marks Almodóvar’s 15th New York Film Festival selection and ninth gala presentation, having premiered numerous Sony Pictures Classics titles at NYFF since 1988, including most recently “Parallel Mothers” and “Pain and Glory.” The NYFF Centerpiece screening will be the film’s U.S. premiere.

Swinton told IndieWire that “The Room Next Door” is an artistic extension of “Pain and Glory,” which was a semi-autobiographical film. Swinton said the upcoming film is “a natural successor, strangely, to ‘Pain and Glory,’ in that it’s about mature friendships and how they sustain us and what we need them for at this stage in our lives. So it’s going to be meaty.”

She teased of “The Room Next Door,” saying, “It’s a beautiful thing, and I can’t say that much more about it, but I can tell you it’s a real Almodóvar film. What I can tell you is that it’s about mature friendship in a way.”

Produced by Almodóvar’s El Deseo, “The Room Next Door” is also released by Sony Pictures Classics.

“The Room Next Door” premieres December 20 in theaters in New York and Los Angeles, and will expand to select cities December 25. The film will get a nationwide rollout from Sony Pictures Classics in January 2025. Check out the teaser below.

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Trailers
The first trailer for Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore has been unveiled.

Almodóvar’s first English-language feature is adapted from the novel by Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through and takes place in Manhattan and upstate New York.

The Room Next Door will premiere in Venice and Sony Pictures Classics will distribute in the US. Warner Bros will distribute in Spain, the UK, and key territories.

Moore and Swinton play Ingrid and Martha, a bestselling author and a war journalist, who rekindle their friendship until Martha requests something that will test their bond.