The Room Next Door
Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: December 20, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
70
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 45 Critic Reviews
Positive:
34
Mixed:
10
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonJan 2, 2025
Aided by sumptuous cinematography (Eduard Grau), a haunting score (Alberto Iglesias) and eye-popping production design (Inbal Weinberg) – there’s always a font of interior decorating ideas in an Almodóvar film – Martha’s journey toward the great unknown has everything but a light at the end of the tunnel. Read full review
100
Time OutKaleem AftabSep 3, 2024
The hot Latin lovers have been replaced by pink snow, and the homoeroticism has been dialled down, but this is Almodóvar’s America and it’s a delight. Read full review
90
The New York TimesAlissa WilkinsonDec 19, 2024
Often movies ask what makes life worth living; this one asks what makes life worth leaving. It is a controversial subject, both in the movie and in the real world, and the film doesn’t treat it lightly. Read full review
88
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldJan 9, 2025
Ultimately, The Room Next Door is as much about love as it is about death — not the romantic kind of love, but the sort in which two friends hold each other up (quite literally, as Martha takes Ingrid’s arm during their walks) and give each other what they need, selflessly. Its final, magical moment finds uncanny beauty in sadness. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonJan 8, 2025
This dramatic two-hander partners one of the cinema’s greatest talkers with one of its best listeners, Julianne Moore. Read full review
83
Original-CinLiam LaceyJan 9, 2025
The reward of the film is watching these two consummate performers playing off each other. Moore is characteristically empathetic and sincere. Swinton, by contrast, is enigmatic and controlling as they wrestle with their different agendas and find mutual consolation in their friendship. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubNatalia KeoganSep 12, 2024
The Spanish maverick’s penchant for melodrama is somewhat off-kilter, but his exquisite eye for color and contrast is decidedly intact, with his lead actresses posing as perfect canvases. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyMaureen Lee LenkerSep 8, 2024
Even with its preoccupation with death, The Room Next Door is not a dour film. In fact, it’s rather optimistic, celebrating the beauties of life and meaningful connection in the face of death with a thoughtful, pensive tone. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesTim GriersonDec 19, 2024
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature travels across the landscape of that most potentially treacly of genres, the cancer drama, locating something tough, tender and brittlely funny in this portrait of two women facing their own impasses. Read full review
80
iFrancesca SteeleOct 25, 2024
The patience and candid discomfort with which Almodóvar approaches it all feels fresh, the women’s relationship increasingly moving. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawOct 23, 2024
I myself found it as extravagant and engrossing and doggedly mysterious as anything he has done recently, with luxuriously self-aware performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and an undertow of darkness often overlooked by yeasayers and naysayers. Read full review
80
Total FilmJane CrowtherOct 7, 2024
Pedro Almodóvar fans may be wrongfooted by the writer/director’s first full-length English-language feature, an atypically austere entry in his canon that’s nevertheless as vivid and haunting as much of his other work. Read full review
80
BBCNicholas BarberSep 8, 2024
The Room Next Door isn't a weighty philosophical work – as mature as it is, it still has glimmers of cheeky humour and campy melodrama. But it develops into a sweetly heartfelt reflection on ageing, dying, and whether or not it's healthy to find joy in the most desperate of circumstances. Read full review
80
TimeStephanie ZacharekSep 3, 2024
The colors of The Room Next Door are its secret message, a language of pleasure and beauty that reminds us how great it is to be alive. If it’s possible to make a joyful movie about death, Almodóvar has just done it. Read full review
80
The TimesKevin MaherSep 2, 2024
In these intensely moving moments it feels as if the two artists — Joyce and Almodóvar — are connecting across time, desperate to express the ineffable, and keen to capture a creative moment that honours both the living and the dead. Read full review
80
Vanity FairRichard LawsonSep 2, 2024
The film is not aiming to depress its audience, though. It is instead cathartic and energizing to witness these dire topics chewed over and spun into delicate poetry. It’s an act of communion, really, Almodóvar drawing us in close to say that yes, yes he shares our same doleful worry. Read full review
80
VarietyOwen GleibermanSep 2, 2024
The Room Next Door, as driven by the scalding humanity of Swinton’s performance, lifts you up and delivers a catharsis. The movie is all about death, yet in the unblinking honesty with which it confronts that subject, it’s powerfully on the side of life. Read full review
80
The Daily BeastBarry LevittSep 2, 2024
This is not the film you may have expected, but this is a film you can cherish. Its characters bursting with life, its music playful, its visuals astonishing, its plot inviting, and its heart is open. All you have to do is listen. Read full review
80
Screen DailyJonathan RomneySep 2, 2024
For a story which ponders on late-life exhaustion and loss of curiosity and pleasure, The Room Next Door strikes a defiant blow against ennui, staking out new territory for the director. Read full review
80
The GuardianXan BrooksSep 2, 2024
It’s a lovely, mordant, tender affair; a lush September song in duet, performed with aplomb by Swinton and Moore as they stroll the secondhand bookstores or lounge by the pool they can’t be bothered to swim in. Read full review
75
Washington PostTy BurrJan 9, 2025
In any event, from whatever impulse, [Almodóvar] has given us a movie that is both an uneasy tribute to exiting with grace and a rationale for sticking around for one more movie, one more meal — one more day with the door open. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comMonica CastilloDec 19, 2024
Quiet yet moving, “The Room Next Door” is a heartfelt meditation on friendship, grief, and death. Read full review
75
The Associated PressJake CoyleDec 18, 2024
What absolutely, undoubtedly does work is Moore and Swinton together. If some of the more melodramatic or crime-movie flourishes feel forced, the central relationship of “The Room Next Door” is consistently provocative. Read full review
75
Film ThreatMaggie RobertsOct 23, 2024
The Room Next Door lacks the transgressive quality that initially endeared me to Almodóvar’s films, especially his early work. Perhaps it is a reflection of the director’s style and a renewed interest in the philosophy of death and dying as he gets older. While it’s still worth a watch, the movie leaves me wanting more, and not necessarily in a good way. Read full review
75
The Film StageRory O'ConnorSep 2, 2024
It’s succinct, light on its feet, totally earnest, and––in spite of some indulgent conversations on art and writing––never feels like it’s trying too hard. Read full review
72
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzJan 7, 2025
Ultimately, it all becomes too strained to take seriously. Read full review
70
ABC NewsPeter TraversJan 3, 2025
Spain’s legendary director Pedro Almodóvar freights his first full-length feature in English with tangled subplots, but nothing can dim the artistry of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore who make this death-fixated tale of old friends in crisis feel thrillingly alive. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreSep 2, 2024
The Room Next Door is an alternately rapturous and ponderous meditation on mortality, though in a very Almodóvarian fashion, that exploration comes by way of a fantasy of set directing one’s own death, down to the moment, location, and outfit worn. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 2, 2024
Swinton and Moore imbue the movie with heart that at first seems elusive, along with the dignity, humanity and empathy that are as much Almodóvar’s subjects here as mortality. Read full review
68
TheWrapBen CrollSep 9, 2024
If the three main draws are too confirmed in respective talents to deliver a subpar performance or a slipshod composition, their shared billing can never quite deliver this film from listlessness. Read full review
66
Paste MagazineJesse HassengerOct 7, 2024
With his careful attention to the controlled emoting from both Swinton and Moore, so free of showy tearjerking or breakdowns, Almodóvar humanely and pointedly avoids turning The Room Next Door into an issue movie dedicated to assisted suicide. Then the movie backs into feeling like one anyway. Read full review
65
The Film VerdictStephen DaltonSep 5, 2024
As ever with Almodóvar, the healing balms of beauty, art, friendship, love and sex offer some consolation in the darkness, including a small but obligatory queer subplot. Read full review
63
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenDec 6, 2024
Much of what makes a great Pedro Almodovar film can be found in The Room Next Door: a layered narrative, a thoughtful color scheme, a focus on women, and an intense interest in sex and/or death. But a certain vitality is strangely missing, and not because of the subject matter. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineMarshall ShafferSep 7, 2024
Centering the impermanence of human existence in the euthanasia drama The Room Next Door doesn’t indicate resignation to a “late period” style so much as it suggests a natural outgrowth of Almodóvar’s formidable body of work. Read full review
60
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeOct 27, 2024
See The Room Next Door for its stunning mid-century architecture, chic interior design, and for Swinton’s enviable euthanasia wardrobe. But don’t expect to feel much of anything, unless you have an unhealthy passion for colour-blocked chunky knitwear. Read full review
60
The Irish TimesTara BradyOct 24, 2024
From Wim Wenders’s Hammett to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth, the English-language debut is a rock on which many directors have run aground. So it proves with Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, a picture stuffed with good performances, pretty things and weighty dialogue that nonetheless fails to coalesce into the shape of an Almodóvar film. Read full review
60
Little White LiesHannah StrongOct 22, 2024
It’s an elegant film, reckoning empathetically with an extremely complex topic, but there’s a slight sense that something is missing, keeping The Room Next Door from ever really becoming truly great. Read full review
60
ColliderMartin TsaiSep 2, 2024
Given Almodóvar’s established penchant for melodrama and that the subject is euthanasia, the film is strangely aloof. It never reduces the proceedings to Lifetime territory or patronizes moviegoers in the process. It does, however, leave you to wonder a bit about the indifference you might ultimately come away with yourself. Read full review
60
Screen RantAlex HarrisonSep 2, 2024
The Spanish director's fingerprint is there, undoubtedly. But the movie feels strangely incomplete, as if made with one hand tied behind his back. Read full review
58
IndieWireRyan LattanzioSep 2, 2024
Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreJan 17, 2025
It’s all perfectly high-minded and polished, but all of this could have been treated with more spark than comes across here. Read full review
50
The Daily BeastNick SchagerDec 21, 2024
Its formal lyricism offset by a script that’s intolerably clunky, it’s an affected portrait of euthanasia and friendship that gets lost in translation. Read full review
50
The PlaylistRafaela Sales RossSep 2, 2024
There is something not quite right about this one Almodóvar film, a dramedy that emulates all that makes a story Almodovarian but bypasses its essence entirely. Read full review
40
The TelegraphRobbie CollinSep 2, 2024
Almodóvar has always been the sole screenwriter of his films – but perhaps in this case, keeping an English assistant in a nearby antechamber might have been a wise move. Read full review
30
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerJan 9, 2025
Such an important and tender subject as assisted suicide deserves more than this mawkish, soapish nonsense. Read full review
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