After sailing through the film festival scene, hit film The Room Next Door – starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore – is coming to cinemas, and it’s not to be missed.
Based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, The Room Next Door explores female friendship, motherhood, queerness and much more – all set at the end of a woman’s life as she reflects on these things, as well as the value in companionship.
It’s very much a story about womanhood – something that critics have praised male director Pedro Amodóvar for doing such justice. “No male filmmaker has more consistently understood female characters and the actresses playing them than Pedro Almodóvar”, a review by The Hollywood Reporter reads.
Here’s everything we know about The Room Next Door.
The Room Next Door plot
We see two women reunite under strange and sad circumstances, after working together on a magazine years previously. Martha (Tilda Swinton) has been hospitalised with cancer, and war reporter Ingrid (Julianne Moore) goes to visit her while she’s having experimental treatment. Then, Martha asks Ingrid for a favour as she approaches the end of her life.
“The film addresses the endless cruelty of war, the very different ways in which the two female authors approach and write about reality, death, friendship and sexual pleasure as the best allies in the fight against horror,” a synopsis for the film reads, describing that Moore and Swinton’s “two friends live in an extreme and strangely sweet situation.”
Sony Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
The Room Next Door cast
Joining Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore will be Melina Matthews, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola, Juan Diego Botto, Victoria Luengo, Alex Hogh Andersen, Esther McGregor, Alvise Rigo and Raúl Arévalo.
The Room Next Door release date
It will be released in UK cinemas on 25 October.
The Room Next Door trailer
Watch below. It looks to be full of melancholy, beautifully shot and ask a lot of questions about what a woman’s life means to her as she nears its end.
