Death is not the enemy. Loneliness is.

In 2024, Pedro Almodóvar 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. Almodóvar 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 Almodóvar doesn’t believe in simplicity, and what begins as a melodrama about farewell turns into a devastating dissection of how we choose to live when we know time is running out. Here, euthanasia is not controversy but dignity, not surrender but a final act of autonomy. And friendship, that non contractual institution the modern world insists on downgrading in favor of romantic love, reveals itself as the only true antidote to emptiness.

The chemistry between Swinton and Moore transcends performance and becomes communion. Both women inhabit Almodóvar’s frame as if they were born inside it: two Almodóvar girls in the United States, surrounded by those saturated colors the director wields the way a giant Rothko wielded red. The costumes, the architecture, every ashtray and every curtain function as extensions of the protagonists’ emotional states. A universe where the aesthetic is never decorative, it narrates. And amid that visual symphony, Almodóvar slips in his usual, razor sharp political darts: critiques of savage neoliberalism, of the extreme right devouring the welfare state, of the environmental collapse we’ve inherited as though it were inevitable. They aren’t pamphlets; they’re conversations, fragments of dialogue that reveal the characters’ ideologies without ever halting the action.

The only stumble, and it must be said, is the translation from Spanish to English. Almodóvar’s dialogue was born in Castilian, and although the adaptation is competent, a certain stiffness creeps into the exchanges, a loss of the oral spontaneity that defines his best screenplays. Swinton and Moore perform masterfully, yet at times they seem to be reciting rather than conversing. It’s the price of crossing languages when your creative identity is so deeply rooted in the musicality of your mother tongue. Even so, the film holds firm. Black humor appears in precisely measured doses for those familiar with the Almodóvar universe: a glance, an apparently innocent remark that contains an entire philosophy of life.

The Room Next Door joins that monumental catalog of All About My Mother, Volver, and Talk to Her without ever needing to justify itself. This is not an American film directed by a Spaniard; it is an Almodóvar film that happens to be in English. The difference is crucial. While Anglo-Saxon cinema treats death with solemnity or spectacle, Almodóvar treats it with intimacy. He films it as though photographing one last meeting between friends on an afternoon when winter is about to arrive, with all the pain and all the tenderness that implies. In doing so, he reaffirms something his detractors have never wanted to admit: his cinema is not regional but universal, not Spanish but essentially human.

Great directors are not measured by how many languages they master, but by how many truths they reveal. Almodóvar has just reminded us that a dignified death is a right, that friendship is sacred, and that our relationships with our children are the most treacherous territory of human experience. All of that in two hours, with two actresses who achieve the impossible: making melodrama feel like realism. That’s not little. That’s everything.