Metacritic reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Spanish director's fingerprint is there, undoubtedly. But the movie feels strangely incomplete, as if made with one hand tied behind his back.

Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor.