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.
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.
