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.
The Spanish director said he built his two lead characters around the source material, with one of them “very strong in front of death and the other one very afraid of the idea of death,” revealing he channeled his own discomfort around death into the latter.
“When I saw that there was a story to tell, then I kept on writing,” he said. “I didn’t go back to the book, because once you establish what story you want to tell, you have to obey what the story tells you it wants to be.”
“The Room Next Door” begins with Ingrid (Moore), a bestselling author who has become fixated on the subject of mortality, paying a hospital visit to her old friend Martha (Swinton), a seasoned war reporter who has been undergoing treatment for cancer. The former colleagues, who are both single and living in Manhattan, quickly rekindle their friendship as they fill each other in on the last few decades and gossip in the park over long-dead artists like Dora Carrington and Virginia Woolf, who both happened to die by suicide.
By the time Martha’s health takes a turn for the worse, they have fully settled back into each other’s lives, leading to the unusual proposition at the heart of the film: Martha asks Ingrid to accompany her to a big-windowed house in the woods and sleep in the room next door, waiting for the day her friend takes a pill and doesn’t wake up.
Once Ingrid agrees, the film becomes like an inversion of director Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 psychosexual masterpiece, “Persona,” about a toxic relationship that develops between an actor and the nurse caring for her at a seaside cottage. Whereas the ailing thespian in Bergman’s black-and-white thriller grows increasingly hostile in response to her caretaker’s constant musings, the bond between Almodóvar’s protagonists tightens as Ingrid listens to Martha contemplate life and death. And during their final days together in the sun-drenched home — moments filled with terror for Bergman’s blondes — the writers find assurance in their roles as the dying woman and the friend whose memories will allow her to live on.
“I was conscious of Bergman, because he’s one of the [filmmakers] that I really love. But as a director, and also as a person, I’m the opposite of Bergman,” Almodóvar said of the Swedish auteur who is referenced throughout the Spanish director’s body of work, including in the 1991 melodrama “High Heels.”
“That cruelty that is part of Bergman’s mastery — a cruelty that you even see him express when he talks about himself — I admire that. But I wanted just the opposite,” he said. “I wanted a movie about mortality, about two friends, but not a dark movie.”
As Almodóvar explained, his aim was to grapple with subjects like assisted suicide and the afterlife in a film that was full of energy, color and light. He did, however, riff on some of the more haunting visual elements, like overlapping visages and ghostly outlines, that Bergman uses to portray the transference between his “Persona” protagonists, who engage in a slightly more literal love affair in addition to being psychologically intertwined.
In Almodóvar’s hands, these phantasmagoric elements — alongside the score by Alberto Iglesias, one of the director’s longtime collaborators — develop the palpable, platonic romance that emerges between the women while they wait for their rendezvous with death.
“For me, the story is a love story at the end. But I wanted a love story without the physical part, because I think the physical part is always problematic,” Almodóvar said when asked about the romantic quality of Ingrid and Martha’s relationship and Nunez’s response to the film. “I wanted a very intense and deep friendship, because that is better than a physical love and less complicated. It’s the best you can give to another person.”
He does, however, contend that “there is this feeling of two women in love” in his latest film, citing the tender gazes the characters exchange, as well as a lingering kiss on the cheek that’s reminiscent of a pivotal scene in “Persona.”
“At the end, they love each other — completely,” he said of Ingrid and Martha.
For decades, Almodóvar defined Spanish cinema with sexually explicit titles like 1989’s “Tie Me Up! Time Me Down!,” the film that is said to have birthed the NC-17 rating. But in recent years, he’s moved away from showcasing physical intimacy to focus on expressions of love outside of touch — even between two people who very much desire each other, like in 2023's “Strange Way of Life.” He’s also turned his attention to less sexually charged taboos, tackling aging, death, grief and reincarnation in films like “Julieta,” “Pain and Glory,” “Parallel Mothers” and “The Room Next Door.”
The 75-year-old director, who is also a self-described atheist, has semi-jokingly attributed this new phase of his filmmaking career to becoming more “austere” over time and, more seriously, to being “like a kid” when it comes to comprehending the great beyond. “I have something where I don’t understand death, and I can’t accept it,” he said.
But his films are neither grim nor ignorant in their treatment of mortality, instead offering a humanistic take on the intrinsic relationship between life and death. And “The Room Next Door,” an imperfect film bursting with hope, is perhaps his most compassionate work yet, exploring not just the significance of being beside someone at the end, but also a person’s right to decide when they die, if they can.
“When life only can offer you pain, I think that we have that right. And the movie is about that,” Almodóvar said, characterizing Martha’s choice to end her life as “a sign of vitality.”
“As a human being, you have the right to live with the most freedom you can,” he added. “You are the owner of your life, but you also are the owner of your death.”