We’re now just about a month away from the U.S. release of Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language The Room Next Door, starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton. The feature took Venice Film Festival by storm, picking up the festival’s top honors with the Golden Lion, and now ahead of its December 20 release from Sony Pictures Classics, one of its stars has revealed it may be her final film.
Speaking in conversation with her co-star Moore in an Elle feature, Swinton revealed, “I’ve always intended that each film would be my final one. It was not wanting to jinx anything because I have had such fun from start to finish. I always thought, ‘Well, that’s a good one to go out on. Let’s just quit while we’re ahead.’ And I feel it today. I feel The Room Next Door is the last film I make. Let’s see if anything else happens.”
While it certainly won’t be the last film she makes, as she’s already wrapped Edward Berger’s The Ballad of a Small Player, Swinton currently doesn’t have anything else confirmed at the moment. Late last year she did reveal she’s planning to star in the next film from her Memoria director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but that is a few years away. Alongside The Room Next Door, Swinton can also be seen in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End next month.
Rory O’Connor said in his review of The Room Next Door, “Speaking as someone who strayed from the Almodóvar flock some films ago, The Room Next Door presents a welcome surprise. His recent output of shorts and medium-length films (Strange Way of Life and The Human Voice) pointed towards a director paring down in all the wrong ways. The Room Next Door is the other kind, the closest he’s come to an exercise in late style: 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. Would an artist who felt they still had something to prove write a scene like the one in which Martha stares out the window of her hospital room, quoting Joyce while pink snowflakes gently fall over the Manhattan skyline? That the sequence works is as much a testament to the strength of the performances (watch out for Moore’s close-up in the scene, a real classic of the genre) as it is to the director’s conviction.”