The Room Next Door

Once they were the very best of friends, Ingrid and Martha, yet later they lost track of each other. However, when Ingrid hears that Martha is suffering from cancer, she decides to visit her in hospital. After the latest treatment fails, Martha decides to take control of her life as well as her death. But she does not want to make this final journey all by herself, so she asks Ingrid to assist her. The latter has reservations, but agrees anyway.

In his first English-language feature film, based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar tells a gripping but never sentimental story about farewell and death, but mainly about friendship and beauty, and he does so with humour. Almodóvar won the Golden Lion in Venice for it, an award he certainly owes in part to the fantastic acting of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore.