It’s rare to see a moving and emotional story of female friendship on screen that isn’t a coming-of-age narrative or based on the experience of girlhood. And that’s the refreshing and brilliant thing about Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, The Room Next Door. It’s a story of a mature friendship between two older women finding their way back to each other. Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore take on the leads of Martha and Ingrid, and as soon as we start talking about her co-star, Moore is smiling as she shares more about their working relationship and friendship.

“Tilda and I have a lot of similarities. We’re the same age. We have children the same age. Interestingly, we’ve had parallel careers. So, we’d always been keen on working with each other and intrigued by one another’s work. Our actual friendship progressed in real time as we made the film. We got to know each other and spent time together, similar to how Ingrid and Martha were developing their bond.” A lot of the warmth and ease that clearly developed between the two actors found its way on screen and is evident in the quiet but palpable chemistry between Martha and Ingrid.

In The Room Next Door, Martha, a former war correspondent now dying of cervical cancer, is keen to reconnect with an old friend, Ingrid, who has become an acclaimed fiction writer. Martha and Ingrid were once colleagues on a New York magazine but haven’t seen each other in years – until Ingrid visits Martha in hospital after hearing from a mutual friend about her illness. As their bond develops, Martha asks Ingrid to be by her side when she takes a euthanasia pill, and they spend her last few weeks together in a peaceful rented country house.

The story is layered with flashbacks, which are slightly detached from the plot’s flow but work really well in shaping each character in the limited time we get to spend with them. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, the film is a beautiful depiction of friendship, compassion and grief. The friendship between Martha and Ingrid is new but brimming with history, complicated but deeply loving and just normal.

“There was something so quotidian about a lot of the things that they were doing. And for me, it’s unusual to be in that kind of situation on a film, because, generally, a relationship between two women is either going to be a love story, a familial relationship or they’re antagonists,” Moore explains to me. She says that antagonism isn’t something she has in her life. Instead, her female friendships are packed with companionship and love and it was a wonderful experience to reflect that on screen for this story.

“I love the idea that Ingrid is constantly showing up for Martha. She’s like, ‘I’m going to talk to you’, ‘I brought you some books’, or ‘I’ll drive again.’ All of these things that we do for each other – the way we show up, the way we listen when someone is in crisis – that’s friendship.” The most profound thing that you can do for someone is show up for them, Moore adds. There’s a very human desire to be in a community, to be in a relationship with one another. In The Room Next Door, Martha is in a time of real crisis but there’s something so beautiful when she realises her cancer isn’t curable, and Ingrid tells her: “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Even though The Room Next Door is Almodóvar’s first English language feature, it still has all the stylistic and poetic qualities of the director’s previous work. There’s a high bar for style, for colour, for musicality and even the English used in the film isn’t vernacular – some of the language is almost like poetry. The orchestral score and rich blocks of colour in the fashion, make-up and design give the film a fairytale-like feel to the cinematography.

“Almodóvar has a visual sensibility to what he does, but it’s also rooted in deeply felt emotion. So, there’s an interesting space between the unreality of what you’re seeing and the deep reality of what you’re feeling. And that’s Pedro’s style and what makes his work so arresting and incredibly emotional,” Moore says. “You’re walloped by feeling by the time you get to the end of the story.”

Interestingly, Moore also shares that this is a film about people talking. Martha is someone who really needs to talk and needs someone who can be the vessel for it, and Ingrid is able to take that on for her friend. But what Ingrid also does is take her conversations with Martha and talk about them with her former lover, Damien, and also to Martha’s daughter, Michelle. “It’s bearing witness to someone as a person but it’s also a transference of thoughts and feelings to the people that Martha really wants to be able to communicate to, and I found that utterly compelling.”

The Room Next Door isn’t simply a film about illness or death; it explores several forms of grief and how these losses shape us all as people. It’s a story of being alive, being human and making mistakes. Moore remembers a line her character says to Martha – and later on, Michelle – that illustrates this humanity perfectly. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. I love that line and that it ties Martha and Michelle together. Because sometimes, you need to hear that, What you’re experiencing and feeling is really OK. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

Images: Warner Bros