Almodóvar's new film is fearlessly female

While staying true to his flamboyance, Almodóvar fashions a quiet, intimate narrative to play out his favourite themes of families and friendships

- NAMRATA JOSHI

At first glance, Pedro Almodóvar's new film, The Room Next Door, his maiden effort in English, feels quite unlike any of his previous works. Even though it is more involving than his recent shorts—The Human Voice (2020) and Strange Way of Life (2023)—it still doesn't come across as emotionally lush and robust as his Spanish classics. In fact, at the start, the characters, their relationships, journeys in life and interactions with each other, appear to be set up and defined by a conscious sense of detachment, but eventually he does draw his viewers into his world, armed with spectacular lead performances from Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore.

At the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion award for the best film, Almodóvar talked about how his initial insecurity about making a film in English vanished at the first reading of the script with Swinton and Moore. "The language wasn't going to be a problem, and not because I mastered English, but because of the total disposition of the whole cast to understand me and to make it easy for me to understand them," he writes. Like most of his films, The Room Next Door is also a talkie, propelled by conversations between people.