Midway through the 2024 Venice Film Festival the audience at the Sala Grande may have just found their new favorite film in competition.
“The Room Next Door,” Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature in English, saw attendees at the September 2 world premiere at La Biennale continue to clap and clap and cheer on stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore long after the film credits had stopped rolling. The talent behind the film took the praise in stride, taking trips up and down the theater stairs to thank several sections of the audience, with Almodóvar even stopping to sign autographs as his cast was getting ready to exit. Quite the cheery response to a film centered around the hot button issue of euthanasia.
The upcoming Sony Pictures Classics release, which sees the Oscar-winning filmmaker adapt Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel “What Are You Going Through,” also stars John Turturro and Alessandro Nivola. In it, Moore plays a bestselling author named Ingrid who reconnects with her longtime friend, a war journalist named Martha, played by Swinton, after learning she has cancer. As their friendship redevelops, and her condition worsens, Martha becomes comfortable enough with Ingrid to bring her into a plot that would allow her to take a pill to end her life.
At the press conference for “The Room Next Door” earlier in the day, euthanasia was at the center of many questions directed toward Almodóvar and company. As the person who plays Martha, Swinton shared her own philosophy on the subject, saying “I personally am not frightened of death, nor have I ever been. I think the whole journey toward accepting death can be long for some people, but for some reason, because of certain experiences in my life, I became aware early. I know it’s coming. I feel it coming, I see it coming,” according to a report from Variety. Swinton added “One of the things that this film is a portrait of is self-determination, someone who decides absolutely to take her life and her living and her dying into her own hands.”
But others on the dais insisted there is more to the plot of Almodóvar’s new film than a death plot. “We very rarely see a story about female friendship, and especially female friends who are older. I don’t know that there’s another filmmaker in the world who would do that other than Pedro,” said Moore. “The importance that he shows us is so unusual. It was so moving to me that he portrayed this relationship as so profound, because it is.”
