If you are a leading woman in a Pedro Almodóvar film, your life will not be frictionless. You will have a terminal illness. Or if you don’t have one, you will be grieving the one that someone very close to you has. You will be a single mother or mother-to-be. You will have very intimate female friendships, but you won’t always be faithful, or act selflessly. You will work a creative career, such as writing or acting or photographing products for advertisements. You won’t care too much about traditional values even though your Catholic family or community does. You will smoke cigarettes and pop pills when you’re stressed. You might have paid a pretty penny for your breasts, or have been naturally endowed. You will be unconventionally, or maybe conventionally, beautiful, and always expressive. You will be middle-aged. You will have a romantic Castilian accent. You might be Penélope Cruz.
To be one of these female protagonists means you will have familial trauma from your mother, or your daughter, or the history of your family going back decades and decades. You might be looking for love in someone who is unattainable or losing your grip on someone you have just reconnected with. You will suffer tragedy, yes, but you won’t disintegrate because of it. Your drama will not be an interior one, for you will eventually reveal what is troubling you to the person who needs to know most. You will evolve from your hardships in a way that the men in your life—if they exist at all—seem incapable of.
●
The first thing one will notice in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, The Room Next Door (2024), an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through, is that it both preserves this formula and subverts it in crucial ways. Two women, colleagues at Paper Magazine at the start of their careers, have recently reconnected after one, Martha (Tilda Swinton), is diagnosed with cancer. She’s ordered a pill on the black market she will use to euthanize herself, and she’s asked Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to be present for her death. All Martha wants is the right place to take the pill, and the right person to be with her when she does. She doesn’t want to die in a place where she’s made good memories. At this point, the other women in Martha’s life are not supportive, or don’t want to be implicated in the decision, and so Martha tells Ingrid she is the perfect person to be in the room next door when it happens.
We’re not exactly sure how things will go on from here, but this is the fulcrum of the plot. It determines how we understand these two women and the way they relate to one another for the remainder of the film. Martha, a war reporter who has traveled to Bosnia and Baghdad, is steel-faced, and has no fear of death. Ingrid is a soft, teary novelist who has just published her latest book—about her fear of death—to great success. Each woman has taken a different path in life, but both are about to take a leap of faith: Martha in choosing to take her own life; Ingrid in agreeing to face the thing she fears most and to help someone she hasn’t talked to in years—someone who, really, she doesn’t know very well.
The Room Next Door is Almodóvar’s first full-length feature to be written in English and set somewhere outside of Spain, in New York. In some ways, it still smells of all his usual preoccupations: the chromatic flourishes and the climactic cancer diagnoses; the Oedipal complexes and reenactments of scenes from his previous films. It is driven by female characters who inhabit interesting jobs, self-medicate for their neuroses and remain unmarried and uninhibited by boring domestic quandaries. But when it comes to its plot, it rejects many of the typical conventions of melodrama we see in Almodóvar’s early work; a turn toward a more mature kind of intimacy than the youthful tick of transgression.
For most of Almodóvar’s career, he has been lauded as the king of camp: the David Bowie of filmmaking, if you will. He is best known for films inspired by 1980s, telenovela-style melodramas: a style that amounts to self-conscious cheesiness, zigzagging plot lines that turn on a dime and rash revelations of secrets or betrayal. In All About My Mother (1999), a transgender woman is shocked when her former lover reveals she was the parent of an aspiring writer who has been hit by a car. In Julieta (2016), a mother, after a chance encounter with an old friend on the sidewalk, learns that her daughter has married and had three children, living for over a decade in secrecy. In Parallel Mothers (2021), a teen mom named Ana learns that the woman she thought was her friend conducted a paternity test on her child behind her back, and once she discovered Ana was the true biological mother, kept the baby as her own. Almodóvar’s movies almost always pass the Bechdel test, but that does not mean his women are always good. His women lie and cheat; they hide from their friends and families, and reappear by surprise. If a relationship between two women in an Almodóvar picture seems, at first, like a normal one, you can almost guarantee he is about to reveal someone is not who she says she is.
This is perhaps the reason why, upon my first viewing of The Room Next Door, I kept waiting for the shoe to drop; for Martha to reveal herself not as a woman simply hoping to end her life with dignity, but rather a homicidal murderer or an undercover exposé writer or, when a male character is introduced by way of John Turturro—a climate doomer and professor who has slept with both Martha and Ingrid in the past—a vengeful harridan coming back for the other woman. For this story of female friendship to move propulsively on the fuel of reliance and conviction, rather than deception, came as something of a welcome but nearly unbelievable surprise. Almodóvar, as it were, did not get famous by being tender.
●
Born to a poor, religious family in the La Mancha region of Spain in the late 1940s, Almodóvar was raised by his mother and a gaggle of female family members, who made a clear mark on his filmmaking. As Almodóvar has suggested in a collection of his personal writing, The Last Dream (2024), his mother Francisca Caballero was practically his whole world, even if she didn’t always like or approve of his work. Caballero plays small roles in Kika (1993), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), and Almodóvar dedicated All About My Mother (1999) to her just before her death. If his films do feature male characters, they are usually gay, and often have strong relationships with their mothers. These portrayals are part of what have made Almodóvar such an icon in the queer community. Particularly in eighties and nineties Spain, the quotidian way he depicted gay men, trans women and exploratory sexual relationships was nearly unprecedented.
“I will write male and female characters,” Almodóvar told the New York Times in 2016, “but I do find at least in Spanish culture, women to be more vivacious, more direct … with a lot less of a sense of being fearful of making a fool of themselves.” Some critics have suggested that Almodóvar “traffics in his idea of women more than women’s actual experiences,” as Daniel Schroeder has said in All About Almodóvar, the podcast he hosts with New Yorker television critic Inkoo Kang. There are also parts of the Spanish director’s worlds that sometimes feel a little artificial, even when he’s not working in an explicitly surrealist or fantastical mode. The telenovela style of his films sometimes verges on operatic. Even when the acting is profound and convincing, his scripts are so theatrical, so explicit, that his characters sometimes feel unnatural in their environments. After seeing The Room Next Door at the New York Film Festival, an acquaintance with little exposure to his work told me the film “sounded like it was written by aliens.” While meant pejoratively, this is a hallmark of Almodóvar’s style, and one that his true fans, myself included, tend to appreciate. Even as The Room Next Door takes new, more existentialist turns, it could be spotted as an Almodóvar film from a mile away: full of artifice, full of theatrics and all the better for it.
While The Room Next Door is not an original screenplay, it’s obvious why Nunez’s novel was ripe subject matter for Almodóvar. In a story in which the two main characters are single, ostensibly straight women, Martha becomes a stand-in for the masculine tendency, a foil to Ingrid’s feminine code. Like Lydia, the female bullfighter in Almodóvar’s controversial film Talk to Her (2002), Martha inhabits a job traditionally thought of as too dangerous for a woman, inspired by the work of a man in her life. (Martha’s deceased baby daddy was traumatized by his service in the Vietnam War; now she’s a war reporter.) Martha is not frilly, made-up or anxious, but cerebral and focused. She is not sad but accepting. “I’m also no stoic,” she tells Ingrid, unprompted, after she makes the decision to end her life—as if she needs to say it in order to make it real.
Throughout the film, there are moments that make us skeptical of Martha, even if we shouldn’t be. In typical Almodóvarian fashion, he introduces ruffles in her character through ambiguous gestures and psycho-thriller feints. Is her forgetfulness just “chemo brain”? Or is she being duplicitous? There is something ominous that hangs over the plot. At one point, when the two women are isolated at Martha’s rented home in the woods, in upstate New York, you start to wonder: Might Martha kill Ingrid instead of herself? In the end, it turns out there was never a reason to be skeptical, beyond our own conditioned expectation of betrayal. Not only has she followed through on her word, but she has also done Ingrid some unexpected favors, offering Ingrid permission to use her story in her fiction, and ultimately taking the euthanasia pill when her friend is out to lunch—to better Ingrid’s alibi for the police. Both women, Almodóvar seems to say, ended up better off by putting their faith in the other.
●
The representation of female friendship in The Room Next Door feels significant amidst those we are used to seeing elsewhere in contemporary cinema—where relationships between women typically come with competitive tendencies, secrets kept from one another and the painful breakups that inevitably follow. It makes perfect sense to me that, in her pre-Barbie era, women connected so deeply with the work of Greta Gerwig, for example. I was among those whose heart panged during Lady Bird (2017), when the angsty high schooler played by Saoirse Ronan lashes out at her mother and lies about which part of Sacramento she lives in to impress her rich friend. Similarly, any woman who watches Frances Ha (2012) knows instinctively how Frances feels when she learns her best friend Sophie has found a new roommate, or when friends of friends end up being the ones to break the news to Frances that Sophie is leaving New York to move to Japan.
What we see in Almodóvar’s latest film feels much more singular than these stock representations of relationships between women—tense, heated and competitive; marked by a boyfriend replacing a best friend, or comparing oneself to another through the sexual preference of a man. Almodóvar is a far different filmmaker from Gerwig, of course—more whimsical, more weird, not a woman himself—but much of his work has shared a sense that women must always be at odds with one another: daughters hating their mothers, resentment between friends, women taking their secrets to the grave. This makes sense in some ways, as it’s much harder to produce interesting fiction about women who are genuinely making sacrifices for each other without being overly saccharine or cloying. The Room Next Door highlights just how infrequently supportive friendships between women are actually found in our novels and on our streaming services. It’s not that these kinds of friendships don’t exist—though I’d argue they are rare, which is also why finding them in real life feels so special—but that the meagerness with which they are represented and explored can be troubling. People love to say that gossip is women’s work. I believe that’s because deception and insincerity is usually what keeps us paying attention.
Rewatching Almodóvar’s archive, one is hard-pressed to find anything quite like the benevolence of The Room Next Door. If there is any precedent in his work, it is perhaps Volver (2006), which he filmed partly in his hometown in La Mancha. A sort of cinematographic Herland, Volver proposes a world in which men are not needed to survive. Its protagonist Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) promise to protect one another, when after nearly being raped by her father, Paula slaughters him with a kitchen knife in their humble Madrid apartment. Coming home to the crime scene, Raimunda doesn’t hesitate to believe her daughter’s story, barely stopping to mourn her dead husband. “Remember, I killed him,” she says to her teenager as she begins to make a plan to mop up his blood and hide the body. The film, A.O. Scott wrote at the time of its release, demonstrated a shift for Almodóvar, in which he moved “beyond camp into a realm of wise, luxuriant humanism.” Volver, however, still relies on some of his usual melodramatic twists. Eventually, Raimunda’s mother, who had been presumed dead, returns to disclose that Paula is not only Raimunda’s daughter but also her half-sister, as Raimunda’s father raped her as a young woman. The Room Next Door is much more subtle. It builds its relational heat not through secrets kept and secrets revealed, but rather through the surprising consummation of taking one’s word to heart.
An early interview with Almodovar, from 1985, seems to offer some clues that a capacity for earnestness has always been a part of his work in some way, even if it was only bubbling below the surface. In the aftermath of the post-Franco dictatorship, Almodóvar’s interviewer was trying to press the young director, mullet-clad in a bedazzled tie, on how much he saw himself as part of La Movida movement, the countercultural faction that rose with Spanish democracy. Almodóvar, in his youthful, defiant form, pushes back on these leading questions, wondering why the interviewer seems to believe that just because his films feature trans people and nymphomaniac women he must be sexually perverted. We see, in the interview, how his early, provocative style became so cemented in the minds of Spanish culture. But we also see the part of him that is drawn to the balance of intimacy, fidelity and loyalty on display in his latest film. At the end of the interview, the interviewer throws out a question, meant to invite a one-word response: “Do you believe that the dog is really a man’s best friend?” he asks. “No,” Almodóvar retorts. “I think it’s a woman’s best friend.”
If you are a leading woman in a Pedro Almodóvar film, your life will not be frictionless. You will have a terminal illness. Or if you don’t have one, you will be grieving the one that someone very close to you has. You will be a single mother or mother-to-be. You will have very intimate female friendships, but you won’t always be faithful, or act selflessly. You will work a creative career, such as writing or acting or photographing products for advertisements. You won’t care too much about traditional values even though your Catholic family or community does. You will smoke cigarettes and pop pills when you’re stressed. You might have paid a pretty penny for your breasts, or have been naturally endowed. You will be unconventionally, or maybe conventionally, beautiful, and always expressive. You will be middle-aged. You will have a romantic Castilian accent. You might be Penélope Cruz.
To be one of these female protagonists means you will have familial trauma from your mother, or your daughter, or the history of your family going back decades and decades. You might be looking for love in someone who is unattainable or losing your grip on someone you have just reconnected with. You will suffer tragedy, yes, but you won’t disintegrate because of it. Your drama will not be an interior one, for you will eventually reveal what is troubling you to the person who needs to know most. You will evolve from your hardships in a way that the men in your life—if they exist at all—seem incapable of.
●
The first thing one will notice in Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, The Room Next Door (2024), an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through, is that it both preserves this formula and subverts it in crucial ways. Two women, colleagues at Paper Magazine at the start of their careers, have recently reconnected after one, Martha (Tilda Swinton), is diagnosed with cancer. She’s ordered a pill on the black market she will use to euthanize herself, and she’s asked Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to be present for her death. All Martha wants is the right place to take the pill, and the right person to be with her when she does. She doesn’t want to die in a place where she’s made good memories. At this point, the other women in Martha’s life are not supportive, or don’t want to be implicated in the decision, and so Martha tells Ingrid she is the perfect person to be in the room next door when it happens.
We’re not exactly sure how things will go on from here, but this is the fulcrum of the plot. It determines how we understand these two women and the way they relate to one another for the remainder of the film. Martha, a war reporter who has traveled to Bosnia and Baghdad, is steel-faced, and has no fear of death. Ingrid is a soft, teary novelist who has just published her latest book—about her fear of death—to great success. Each woman has taken a different path in life, but both are about to take a leap of faith: Martha in choosing to take her own life; Ingrid in agreeing to face the thing she fears most and to help someone she hasn’t talked to in years—someone who, really, she doesn’t know very well.
The Room Next Door is Almodóvar’s first full-length feature to be written in English and set somewhere outside of Spain, in New York. In some ways, it still smells of all his usual preoccupations: the chromatic flourishes and the climactic cancer diagnoses; the Oedipal complexes and reenactments of scenes from his previous films. It is driven by female characters who inhabit interesting jobs, self-medicate for their neuroses and remain unmarried and uninhibited by boring domestic quandaries. But when it comes to its plot, it rejects many of the typical conventions of melodrama we see in Almodóvar’s early work; a turn toward a more mature kind of intimacy than the youthful tick of transgression.
For most of Almodóvar’s career, he has been lauded as the king of camp: the David Bowie of filmmaking, if you will. He is best known for films inspired by 1980s, telenovela-style melodramas: a style that amounts to self-conscious cheesiness, zigzagging plot lines that turn on a dime and rash revelations of secrets or betrayal. In All About My Mother (1999), a transgender woman is shocked when her former lover reveals she was the parent of an aspiring writer who has been hit by a car. In Julieta (2016), a mother, after a chance encounter with an old friend on the sidewalk, learns that her daughter has married and had three children, living for over a decade in secrecy. In Parallel Mothers (2021), a teen mom named Ana learns that the woman she thought was her friend conducted a paternity test on her child behind her back, and once she discovered Ana was the true biological mother, kept the baby as her own. Almodóvar’s movies almost always pass the Bechdel test, but that does not mean his women are always good. His women lie and cheat; they hide from their friends and families, and reappear by surprise. If a relationship between two women in an Almodóvar picture seems, at first, like a normal one, you can almost guarantee he is about to reveal someone is not who she says she is.
This is perhaps the reason why, upon my first viewing of The Room Next Door, I kept waiting for the shoe to drop; for Martha to reveal herself not as a woman simply hoping to end her life with dignity, but rather a homicidal murderer or an undercover exposé writer or, when a male character is introduced by way of John Turturro—a climate doomer and professor who has slept with both Martha and Ingrid in the past—a vengeful harridan coming back for the other woman. For this story of female friendship to move propulsively on the fuel of reliance and conviction, rather than deception, came as something of a welcome but nearly unbelievable surprise. Almodóvar, as it were, did not get famous by being tender.
●
Born to a poor, religious family in the La Mancha region of Spain in the late 1940s, Almodóvar was raised by his mother and a gaggle of female family members, who made a clear mark on his filmmaking. As Almodóvar has suggested in a collection of his personal writing, The Last Dream (2024), his mother Francisca Caballero was practically his whole world, even if she didn’t always like or approve of his work. Caballero plays small roles in Kika (1993), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), and Almodóvar dedicated All About My Mother (1999) to her just before her death. If his films do feature male characters, they are usually gay, and often have strong relationships with their mothers. These portrayals are part of what have made Almodóvar such an icon in the queer community. Particularly in eighties and nineties Spain, the quotidian way he depicted gay men, trans women and exploratory sexual relationships was nearly unprecedented.
“I will write male and female characters,” Almodóvar told the New York Times in 2016, “but I do find at least in Spanish culture, women to be more vivacious, more direct … with a lot less of a sense of being fearful of making a fool of themselves.” Some critics have suggested that Almodóvar “traffics in his idea of women more than women’s actual experiences,” as Daniel Schroeder has said in All About Almodóvar, the podcast he hosts with New Yorker television critic Inkoo Kang. There are also parts of the Spanish director’s worlds that sometimes feel a little artificial, even when he’s not working in an explicitly surrealist or fantastical mode. The telenovela style of his films sometimes verges on operatic. Even when the acting is profound and convincing, his scripts are so theatrical, so explicit, that his characters sometimes feel unnatural in their environments. After seeing The Room Next Door at the New York Film Festival, an acquaintance with little exposure to his work told me the film “sounded like it was written by aliens.” While meant pejoratively, this is a hallmark of Almodóvar’s style, and one that his true fans, myself included, tend to appreciate. Even as The Room Next Door takes new, more existentialist turns, it could be spotted as an Almodóvar film from a mile away: full of artifice, full of theatrics and all the better for it.
While The Room Next Door is not an original screenplay, it’s obvious why Nunez’s novel was ripe subject matter for Almodóvar. In a story in which the two main characters are single, ostensibly straight women, Martha becomes a stand-in for the masculine tendency, a foil to Ingrid’s feminine code. Like Lydia, the female bullfighter in Almodóvar’s controversial film Talk to Her (2002), Martha inhabits a job traditionally thought of as too dangerous for a woman, inspired by the work of a man in her life. (Martha’s deceased baby daddy was traumatized by his service in the Vietnam War; now she’s a war reporter.) Martha is not frilly, made-up or anxious, but cerebral and focused. She is not sad but accepting. “I’m also no stoic,” she tells Ingrid, unprompted, after she makes the decision to end her life—as if she needs to say it in order to make it real.
Throughout the film, there are moments that make us skeptical of Martha, even if we shouldn’t be. In typical Almodóvarian fashion, he introduces ruffles in her character through ambiguous gestures and psycho-thriller feints. Is her forgetfulness just “chemo brain”? Or is she being duplicitous? There is something ominous that hangs over the plot. At one point, when the two women are isolated at Martha’s rented home in the woods, in upstate New York, you start to wonder: Might Martha kill Ingrid instead of herself? In the end, it turns out there was never a reason to be skeptical, beyond our own conditioned expectation of betrayal. Not only has she followed through on her word, but she has also done Ingrid some unexpected favors, offering Ingrid permission to use her story in her fiction, and ultimately taking the euthanasia pill when her friend is out to lunch—to better Ingrid’s alibi for the police. Both women, Almodóvar seems to say, ended up better off by putting their faith in the other.
●
The representation of female friendship in The Room Next Door feels significant amidst those we are used to seeing elsewhere in contemporary cinema—where relationships between women typically come with competitive tendencies, secrets kept from one another and the painful breakups that inevitably follow. It makes perfect sense to me that, in her pre-Barbie era, women connected so deeply with the work of Greta Gerwig, for example. I was among those whose heart panged during Lady Bird (2017), when the angsty high schooler played by Saoirse Ronan lashes out at her mother and lies about which part of Sacramento she lives in to impress her rich friend. Similarly, any woman who watches Frances Ha (2012) knows instinctively how Frances feels when she learns her best friend Sophie has found a new roommate, or when friends of friends end up being the ones to break the news to Frances that Sophie is leaving New York to move to Japan.
What we see in Almodóvar’s latest film feels much more singular than these stock representations of relationships between women—tense, heated and competitive; marked by a boyfriend replacing a best friend, or comparing oneself to another through the sexual preference of a man. Almodóvar is a far different filmmaker from Gerwig, of course—more whimsical, more weird, not a woman himself—but much of his work has shared a sense that women must always be at odds with one another: daughters hating their mothers, resentment between friends, women taking their secrets to the grave. This makes sense in some ways, as it’s much harder to produce interesting fiction about women who are genuinely making sacrifices for each other without being overly saccharine or cloying. The Room Next Door highlights just how infrequently supportive friendships between women are actually found in our novels and on our streaming services. It’s not that these kinds of friendships don’t exist—though I’d argue they are rare, which is also why finding them in real life feels so special—but that the meagerness with which they are represented and explored can be troubling. People love to say that gossip is women’s work. I believe that’s because deception and insincerity is usually what keeps us paying attention.
Rewatching Almodóvar’s archive, one is hard-pressed to find anything quite like the benevolence of The Room Next Door. If there is any precedent in his work, it is perhaps Volver (2006), which he filmed partly in his hometown in La Mancha. A sort of cinematographic Herland, Volver proposes a world in which men are not needed to survive. Its protagonist Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) promise to protect one another, when after nearly being raped by her father, Paula slaughters him with a kitchen knife in their humble Madrid apartment. Coming home to the crime scene, Raimunda doesn’t hesitate to believe her daughter’s story, barely stopping to mourn her dead husband. “Remember, I killed him,” she says to her teenager as she begins to make a plan to mop up his blood and hide the body. The film, A.O. Scott wrote at the time of its release, demonstrated a shift for Almodóvar, in which he moved “beyond camp into a realm of wise, luxuriant humanism.” Volver, however, still relies on some of his usual melodramatic twists. Eventually, Raimunda’s mother, who had been presumed dead, returns to disclose that Paula is not only Raimunda’s daughter but also her half-sister, as Raimunda’s father raped her as a young woman. The Room Next Door is much more subtle. It builds its relational heat not through secrets kept and secrets revealed, but rather through the surprising consummation of taking one’s word to heart.
An early interview with Almodovar, from 1985, seems to offer some clues that a capacity for earnestness has always been a part of his work in some way, even if it was only bubbling below the surface. In the aftermath of the post-Franco dictatorship, Almodóvar’s interviewer was trying to press the young director, mullet-clad in a bedazzled tie, on how much he saw himself as part of La Movida movement, the countercultural faction that rose with Spanish democracy. Almodóvar, in his youthful, defiant form, pushes back on these leading questions, wondering why the interviewer seems to believe that just because his films feature trans people and nymphomaniac women he must be sexually perverted. We see, in the interview, how his early, provocative style became so cemented in the minds of Spanish culture. But we also see the part of him that is drawn to the balance of intimacy, fidelity and loyalty on display in his latest film. At the end of the interview, the interviewer throws out a question, meant to invite a one-word response: “Do you believe that the dog is really a man’s best friend?” he asks. “No,” Almodóvar retorts. “I think it’s a woman’s best friend.”
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.