Death is not the enemy. Loneliness is.
In 2024, Pedro Almod贸var shot his first film entirely in English, and the result was not an act of concession but one of conquest. The Room Next Door confirmed what Hollywood has sensed for decades: the man from La Mancha never needed to cross the Atlantic to be universal, but when he finally chose to do so, he did it entirely on his own terms. From To Wong Foo to Desperate Housewives, America has flirted with his visual language without ever fully understanding it. Almod贸var responded by giving them Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, two sacred titans of contemporary cinema, who, under his direction, discovered something no American script had ever offered them: permission to be simultaneously fragile and ferocious, especially Swinton. The plot is simple to the point of brutality. Two old friends reunite after years apart. One of them is dying. But Almod贸var doesn’t believe in simplicity, and what begins as a melodrama about farewell turns into a devastating dissection of how we choose...
