The Room Next Door

Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door (Spanish: La habitación de al lado) won the Golden Lion at the 81st Venice International Film Festival in September 2024, the first time Almodóvar had taken the Venice top prize after over forty years of work, and his first English-language feature to compete in the festival's main competition. It earned an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film at the 97th ceremony in March 2025.

The film is adapted from Sigrid Nunez's 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, which had been longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Hemingway/PEN Award the year of its publication. Almodóvar had previously directed two English-language short films (The Human Voice (2020) with Tilda Swinton and Strange Way of Life (2023) with Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke) both as deliberate preparation for his transition to feature-length English-language work; The Room Next Door is the result.

The cast pairs Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in the central roles, with John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola and the breakthrough role for Esther McGregor in support. The screenplay is by Almodóvar himself; cinematography is by Eduard Grau, and the score is by Alberto Iglesias, Almodóvar's regular composer of over thirty years. The film was shot largely in Madrid (with sequences shot in upstate New York and on Long Island for the principal house location). Almodóvar has spoken in interviews about the film as an extension of the late-period meditation on aging and friendship he had begun with Pain and Glory in 2019.