Venice 2024: Pedro Almodóvar’s ’The Room Next Door’ gets the longest standing ovation at festival so far at nearly 20 minutes

Pedro Almodóvar's English-language debut film starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore premieres at Venice Film Festival.

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar returned to the Venice Film Festival with stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. Their film, The Room Next Door, had its world premiere on the Lido, where it received a standing ovation for nearly 20 minutes. Though a new Almodóvar film is always an event for cinephiles, this one has special significance: It’s his English-language debut.

“My insecurity disappeared after the first table read with the actresses, with the exchange of the first indications,” he wrote in his director’s statement. “The language wasn’t going to be a problem, and not because I master English, but because of the total disposition of the whole cast to understand me and to make it easy for me to understand them.”

Moore and Swinton play disconnected friends, who met in their youths at a magazine job, and whose lives took different paths. Ingrid (Moore) wrote novels. Martha (Swinton) became a war reporter. And now after years apart, they meet again, in New York, when Ingrid finds out Martha has cancer and is in a nearby hospital.

Over the next weeks and months, they reconnect, learning about one another's lives and Martha's estranged daughter through a series of revealing conversations.

Before the film's premiere, Swinton said that it would never have occurred to her that Almodóvar might eventually find a space for her in one of his films. She said she has “worshipped in his high church” ever since seeing “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” in the late 1980s in London. In Almodóvar was a kindred artistic spirit, she thought.

“I still feel like a student seeing his first film,” Swinton said. But she was English and he worked solely in Spanish. The idea of collaborating seemed like a fantasy only. Then one day, she said, she got up the nerve to say something to him. “I said, ‘Listen I’ll learn Spanish for you, you can make me mute,’” Swinton said. “Characteristically, he laughed.”

Almodóvar’s last Venice appearance was in 2021, where he presented the film Parallel Mothers, for which Penelope Cruz won its the Volpi Cup for Best Actress. In 2019, Venice also gave him a lifetime achievement award. But his history with Venice stretches back 40 years.