Actresses Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton’s female friendship in The Room Next Door

NEW YORK – Oscar-winning Pedro Almodovar, the Spanish writer-director known for his explorations of complex relationships, makes his English-language feature debut with The Room Next Door, a story of friendship in the face of death.

Opening in Singapore cinemas on Dec 5, the drama follows Martha (Tilda Swinton) and Ingrid (Julianne Moore), friends who have fallen out of touch but reconnect when Martha faces a terminal illness decades later. 

It won the Golden Lion prize at the Venice International Film Festival earlier in 2024.

Speaking at a screening of the movie in New York in October, Almodovar, 75, says he cast Swinton and Moore because of the chemistry they all shared.

“I love them as actresses. I also worked with Tilda before and we became very close friends, and there was an immediate chemistry between us,” says Almodovar. He had cast Swinton in The Human Voice, his 2020 English-language short film.

And the first time the two actresses met, “it was like an epiphany for them”.

“They started talking – and they kept on talking for five months about every subject,” adds the film-maker. He also won the Best International Feature Oscar for the comedy-drama All About My Mother (1999) and Best Original Screenplay for psychological melodrama Talk To Her (2002).

And he had a hunch they would hit it off.

“When you decide to cast people, you do it based on intuition – there’s no precise science.

“But my intuition worked very well, and it is very important that they became very close friends because that friendship is on-screen.

“The movie talks about mortality, but it also talks about the empathy of someone just being close to someone else, because sometimes, this is the best thing you can do for a friend – even without talking, but probably, you need to know how to listen,” Almodovar adds.

For Swinton, the bond between the two women in the story is even more special because they were apart for so long.

“There’s something about this ancient friendship that I want to mention because we all, even young people, have old friends.

“And there’s something about having an old friendship that is interrupted for a couple of decades, then finding someone again and knowing you can go straight to the important stuff,” says the 64-year-old English performer, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for the legal thriller Michael Clayton (2007).

“Because you don’t have to bother about all of the ‘What did you do last week?’ and ‘What about that affair that only lasted for a month?’ You can go to what’s really important, and what hasn’t changed about you.

“And it’s very rare that we see a relationship like this between two women on screen, but we do have these relationships and we also really rely on them,” Swinton says.

For Moore, 63, The Room Next Door is about how humans know they are not alone.

“The nature of the human condition is sometimes solipsistic. You don’t know if you exist, you’re always, like, ‘Could I be imagining all of this? Am I completely alone?’” says the American star, who won a Best Actress Oscar for playing an Alzheimer’s patient in the drama Still Alice (2014).

“I think the only way you know you’re not alone is when someone else is witnessing you, and what’s so profound about this film is that all these people are gathered together to make something to prove that we’re not alone – to prove that we lived.

“And I think that’s what Pedro’s movies are about – how you witness the human condition in all of its humour, fallibility and depth,” adds Moore.

The friendship between the two women ultimately gives Martha the strength to face the biggest challenge of her life.

Swinton says: “I’ve always believed there are three things that will always get you through – art, friendship and nature. And that’s actually the text of this film. What Martha looks for when she’s really up against it are those three things.”