Kevin Lally on Film

Avid readers of fiction will know the name Sigrid Nunez, author of nine novels and winner of the National Book Award for her seventh, The Friend (2018). But for many of us, the 2024 New York Film Festival has been the introduction to her world, with the New York premieres of two film versions of her books, the aforementioned The Friend and The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, adapted from Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through. Each should play a role in the fall awards conversation.

The two stories are linked by the specter of death. In The Friend, Naomi Watts plays Iris, a writer and teacher whose mentor and onetime lover, Walter (Bill Murray), a celebrated author, has committed suicide. Walter’s third wife (Noma Dumezweni) has some important business to settle with Iris: the matter of her late husband’s Great Dane, Apollo, which she refuses to care for. Iris lives in a small, rent-controlled apartment near Washington Square which doesn’t permit pets, but she finds herself grudgingly agreeing to temporarily shelter the giant canine. The hound immediately claims Iris’s bed and mopes all day, in deep mourning for his deceased owner. (Curiously, the only time Apollo comes alive is when he’s being read to.) The dog becomes a serious liability: Iris is forced to bring it to an important appointment with her editor, and her super keeps warning her that she’s breaking house rules and could face eviction. But very gradually, Iris and that noble beast forge a bond, leading her to take drastic action.

Writer-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End, What Maisie Knew) have created a gentle study of grief: What truly unites Iris and Apollo is the unfathomable mystery of the death of their mutual friend. Apollo is a huge, messy inconvenience, but he ultimately fills a void Iris didn’t realize was so cavernous. Murray, with his idiosyncratic irreverence, is the perfect actor to represent a one-of-a-kind absence. And the always appealing Watts is instantly sympathetic as a New Yorker barely holding it together—she deserves extra praise for agreeing to spend so much screen time with such an unwieldy co-star. A Great Dane named Bing plays Apollo with more soul than many a human actor.

The trajectory of Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar’s career over the decades has been fascinating to watch. He began as an enfant terrible with cheeky comedies and melodramas like Labyrinth of Passion, Matador, Law of Desire, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, then evolved with more complex and nuanced dramas like All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Volver, and Broken Embraces, with the occasional return to the outlandish in films like Bad Education and The Skin I Live In. His two most recent features, the semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory and the poignant Parallel Mothers, are among his most accomplished.

Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in The Room Next Door

Now, at age 75, Almodóvar has made his English-language feature debut with The Room Next Door, co-starring the formidable duo of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton. Swinton plays Martha, a retired war correspondent who is dealing with Stage 3 cervical cancer. Moore is Ingrid, a bestselling writer who learns at a Manhattan book signing that her old friend, whom she hasn’t seen in years, is ill. When Martha’s experimental treatment fails, she approaches Ingrid with a huge ask: to be her companion in her final weeks at a rented house in the country before she takes an illegal euthanasia pill.

Initially I was prepared for an austere chamber drama, but the script takes several digressions (borrowed from the novel): the story of Martha’s affair with a troubled Vietnam veteran that produced a child; Martha’s recollection of two gay Spanish missionaries she met during her time in Baghdad. Eventually it gets to the heart of the matter: Ingrid’s conflicted feelings over the pact she’s agreed to (her most recent book confronts her fear of death), and her tender but sometimes prickly relationship with the headstrong Martha.

The dialogue is sometimes stilted, but it’s a privilege to watch two gifted actresses explore the film’s themes of friendship, compassion, and mortality. The packed New York Film Festival press screening featured a Q&A with Almodóvar, Moore, Swinton, and co-star John Turturro (who plays a former lover of both women who provides moral support to Ingrid), and it was touching to watch the two actresses hold hands throughout the session. Almodóvar had previously worked with Swinton on his English-language short The Human Voice, and he revealed that he and Swinton wrote simultaneous emails suggesting Moore as her co-star. “Only the great actresses know how to listen,” he said of his leading players—and watching Moore and Swinton interact so beautifully is what makes The Room Next Door so potent and moving.

Pictured above: Naomi Watts and Bing in The Friend. Photos courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center.