A piece of paper comes into view, on it is written one word: “Goodbye.†And so renowned Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar begins his upcoming film, The Room Next Door, his first feature in English. In its first trailer out August 20, nobody says any words, but there is one sound: Tilda Swinton screaming while rifling through a small, metal briefcase. Yes, you can tell that the scream is not in Spanish due to its harsh, Germanic-derived nature. The film stars Swinton with Julianne Moore, a beautiful combo of experts at representing two very different versions of “brittle,†as former friends Ingrid (Moore), an auto-fiction novelist, and Martha (Swinton), a war reporter, who re-meet “in an extreme but strangely sweet situation,†per the film’s press release. What could the situation be? We’re guessing an explosion at the red-lipstick factory.
The film is based on the 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, by Sigrid Nunez. Alongside its two capital-A Actresses, it stars John Turturro and Alessandro Nivola. The Room Next Door will premiere at the Venice Film Festival, which begins on August 28, where it will be in competition, but it won’t be in theaters for the rest of us until December 20. Still, that date makes sense because Moore and Swinton starring in an Almodóvar film is the greatest Christmas present of all.