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

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.

Related: Pedro Almodóvar: ‘There should be the possibility to have euthanasia all over the world’

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.

Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar’s film takes its sweet time bedding down, taking root. The director’s spiky Spanish-cubist dialogue feels flat and awkward when translated into English, while the tale’s rote Americana (milkshakes, flatbeds, a burning house on the prairie) stirs memories of Wong Kar-Wai’s fatally mishandled My Blueberry Nights. It’s only after the drama has relocated to upstate New York, specifically to a rented brutalist house outside Woodstock, that it relaxes and loosens to the point where Ingrid and Martha’s pained interactions begin to make perfect sense. It’s hard to discuss the big issues – life and death – with your nearest and dearest, let alone old acquaintances. The two ex-colleagues, one realises, are working blind, getting it wrong, mostly feeling their way around the only subject that matters.

In the room the women come and go, talking of Faulkner and Hemingway, James Joyce’s The Dead and even Roger Lewis’s recently published Erotic Vagrancy, because they are educated, slightly lofty and possess an abundance of literary and cinematic references to deploy as their armour. Visiting nearby Bard College to give a lecture, the disillusioned Damian has no time for all that. Novels and poetry mean nothing these days. Climate breakdown is going to kill us all, he says, and the man may be right. Except that when the unseasonable snow falls on the Hudson Valley, Ingrid and Martha watch it in a state of wonder, as though this foretaste of death is a blessing in disguise. Martha doesn’t quite know when she is going to take her own life. She explains to Ingrid that she’ll leave her bedroom door ajar every night when she sleeps . The morning it’s shut is the morning she’ll be gone.

As for Almodóvar, God willing he has many more films in him yet. But the director’s third act has been marked by a preoccupation with death. The superb Pain and Glory sent a careworn Antonio Banderas (effectively Almodóvar’s surrogate) under the knife; 2021’s Parallel Mothers disinterred the bones of the Spanish civil war. Despite its dynamic US trappings (that skyline, those milkshakes), The Room Next Door continues his contemplative line of travel. It’s a lovely, mordant, tender affair; a lush September song in duet, performed with aplomb by Swinton and Moore as they stroll the secondhand bookstores or lounge by the pool they can’t be bothered to swim in. The film becomes richer and truer the more Martha and Ingrid re-establish their friendship so that the shut door and end credits leave us feeling bereft. That tends to be the way with every good story and probably with every worthwhile relationship, too, because flesh fails, the clock ticks and it is always later than we think.

• The Room Next Door screened at the Venice film festival