Pedro Almodóvar bathes death in light, colour, and calm

In his remarkable award-winning film 'The Room Next Door', the legendary Spanish film director deals with the end of life head-on in what amounts to a rare cinematic meditation

El Deseo/Warner Bros

Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in "The Room Next Door"

Pedro Almodóvar bathes death in light, colour, and calm

Samer Abou Hawwach

last update on 27 Feb 2025

Many films have explored the theme of death, whether directly or indirectly. Indeed, few great literary, cinematic, or artistic works are untouched by its motif.

Akira Kurosawa’s Tokyo Story, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, Salah Abu Seif’s The Water Carrier is Dead, and Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry are some that tackle the end of life directly. Others approach it more obliquely through themes of loss and mourning, as seen in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blue from The Three Colours trilogy, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Still Walking, and Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea.

One of the most recent contributions to the topic is The Room Next Door, directed by Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, who also penned the screenplay. Adapted from American author Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What You Are Going Through, the film is Almodóvar’s first English-language feature film, and it won the prestigious Golden Lion at last summer’s Venice Film Festival.

Almodóvar’s treatment of death does not significantly diverge from the traditions of these earlier works. Rather than portraying death as tragic or catastrophic, it emerges as something intrinsically bound to life—its companion, neighbour, or even its twin.

Controlling one’s fate

At the heart of the story is Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war correspondent who has spent her career close to death, particularly in Iraq and Bosnia. She has lost colleagues and the love of her life: the father of her only daughter, who returned from the Vietnam War irrevocably changed, a stranger to the man he once was.

Martha is diagnosed with advanced cancer and chemotherapy does not work. It also leaves her senses dulled and deteriorating, so she decides to forego further treatment and take control of her own fate: by taking a special pill. For Martha, this is no surrender but a battle of a different kind, one that she is no longer covering from afar but waging herself, with a frail body and fading memory. It is, at its core, a refusal to submit to the constraints that illness imposes on body and spirit.

The idea of death as a deliberate personal choice to avoid suffering (often called euthanasia) is still a subject of intense debate, particularly in the West. Almodóvar enters the discussion, challenging the idea that the right to die is only for those who are totally physically incapacitated or ‘vegetative’, kept alive by machines.

The suggestion is that this choice should extend to those who refuse to endure the suffering of an aggressive medical treatment journey that, even if led to survival, could leave someone irreparably broken.

The idea of death as a deliberate personal choice to avoid suffering is still a subject of intense debate, particularly in the West

Companionship

Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is Martha's longtime friend who comes to be with her. A successful novelist, she has a deep-seated fear of death, which she sees as an unnatural and unnecessary accident, so she is uneasy when Martha asks her to join her in the final days. Martha plans to take the pill (criminally acquired) but wants someone to be in the room next door when she does.

The proximity to death fractures Ingrid's carefully constructed world, yet these fractures remain largely unseen. Her anxieties and fears never fully surface. We learn through a conversation with her boyfriend, Damien (John Turturro)—who was also Martha's lover years earlier—that Ingrid is "the only one who suffers without making others feel guilty".

She not only agrees to Martha's request but also consistently maintains an air of unwavering support and positivity toward her dying friend, perhaps explaining why Ingrid's character often seems passive. She absorbs Martha's emotions, aligning herself with her rhythm without much room for personal expression.

This narrative structure limits Moore's ability to fully explore the complexities of her character, particularly her fear of death while letting Swinton command the film's emotional and narrative centre.

El Deseo/Warner Bros — Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in "The Room Next Door"

Cinematic style

In Sigrid Nunez's 2020 novel, published at the height of the pandemic, Ingrid serves as the narrator, but Almodóvar opts instead for a cinematic style that transforms the two protagonists into integral elements of the visual composition. As viewers, it is as if we are standing before a painting, bathed in light and colour.

This artistic approach is reinforced by the inclusion of Edward Hopper's famous painting People in the Sun, in which a group of people sit on a hotel balcony, basking in sunlight and gazing at the landscape. The painting is prominently displayed in the opulent holiday home where Martha chooses to spend her final days.

This underscores Almodóvar's aesthetic inclination toward light, colour, and serenity, with cinematographer Edo Garo enhancing this vision, turning nearly every shot into a masterful composition that builds upon Almodóvar's established cinematic vocabulary while introducing a new sense of visual depth and artistry.

Against this luminous backdrop, the characters' internal conflicts stand in stark contrast to the warmth and vitality of their surroundings. Nowhere is this more evident than in the film's most Hopper-esque scene: Martha and Ingrid lying side by side, soaking in the sun on the terrace.

Almodóvar opts for a cinematic style that transforms the two protagonists into integral elements of the visual composition

Inhabiting a moment

It is as if Almodóvar seeks to eternalise these fleeting moments of happiness by framing them in a tableau where time stands still, rendering the past and future irrelevant. What matters is the here and now. Almodóvar underscores this juxtaposition—perhaps too explicitly—throughout the film.

The memories Martha revisits, whether as a war correspondent or with her first love, serve to heighten this contrast, anchoring the characters even more deeply in the present, with a profound sense of peace derived from truly inhabiting a moment. A conversation between Ingrid and Damien further amplifies this theme as he expresses his despair over humanity's destruction of the planet.

Ingrid and Martha's time together in the house, where Martha will ultimately end her life, becomes a kind of sanctuary, shielding them from the world's ugliness and the looming spectre of death. The horrors of war, disease, and environmental destruction are all kept at bay. In the end, what matters are the moments of pure friendship shared between the two women.

Their days together become a ritual of renewal, of bathing—both literally and figuratively—in the warmth of the sun and in the quiet surrender to inner peace. More than anything, this film is about reclaiming power over death and finding solace in the fleeting beauty of the present.

In nature's embrace

In a world that can sometimes seem to be overflowing with coverage of death, cruelty, casualties, wars, and disasters, Almodóvar chooses to set life against death, yet not necessarily in conflict with it. This choice serves as a counterstatement to the prevailing climate of despair and catastrophe.

This film will not be loved by all. For some, it may seem bourgeois. After all, not everyone can control the manner or timing of their death by choosing a setting that is almost romantically serene as the stage for their final farewell, reclining in nature's embrace, watching Buster Keaton or John Huston's The Dead, or reflecting on the haunting final words of James Joyce's story.

Likewise, not everyone speaks in the philosophical, existential, and semi-theatrical manner that Almodóvar's characters do. Yet it is precisely Almodóvar's philosophical austerity—his embrace of silence and his visual storytelling—that makes this film so remarkable and shows him at the height of his cinematic maturity. In the film's trailer, not a single word is uttered.

Snow falling gently

In stark contrast to the unrelenting torrent of reality streaming from screens, The Room Next Door offers a rare cinematic meditation. In a world where everything is consumed, erased, and forgotten with ruthless speed, it can often feel like there is no room for quiet contemplation. The Room Next Door is a breath of fresh air in a suffocating world.

In one of the film's most poignant scenes, Martha and Ingrid return to the apartment Martha had supposedly left behind forever to retrieve the forgotten pill. As they stand there, Martha says: "I feel like a ghost visiting my old home."

At the film's end, Martha's daughter appears after her mother's passing and lies beside Ingrid on the balcony, just as her mother once did, giving the viewers (And Ingrid) an eerie sensation of spectral continuity.

Here, the film's central idea—the quiet intimacy between life and death—is fully realised. When Martha dies, she leaves no void, nor does her story dissolve. Instead, what remains is a world imbued with a bittersweet yet enduring memory. As Joyce perfectly captures in The Dead's final line: "The snow was falling, falling gently upon all the living and the dead."

+ / -