"Live Flesh" (1997), "The Skin I Live In" (2012), "Julieta" (2016) and "The Room Next Door" (2024) are the four films that Pedro Almodóvar has made based on works of contemporary literature, the latter starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, being his first feature film in English and already winner of a well-deserved Golden Lion a couple of months ago; It tells the story set in New York of two women who in the past were very close friends when they worked together in a magazine, Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, who became a famous autofiction novelist and Tilda Swinton is Martha, a war correspondent, who in the present is dying of cancer, both women had not seen each other for years due to the different directions their lives took, until one day while Ingrid is doing a signing of her latest novel in a bookstore she meets a mutual acquaintance of both who gives her the sad news of Martha's terminal condition and encourages her to go visit her in the hospital, which Ingrid does immediately, despite not having seen each other in quite some time, their immediate reactions were with the greatest nature, as if they had never been separated, and giving veracity to the fact that true friendship does not need a strict frequency.

From the first moment Martha appears on screen, she is extremely emaciated and pale, a ghost clinging to life. Ingrid suddenly makes a strong connection with her old friend. They reminisce about old anecdotes and Martha reveals her distant relationship with her daughter, who was indifferent when she learned of her mother's condition and of the plan she has in mind to end her agony with dignity. Martha asks Ingrid to go with her to a luxurious country house near Woodstock to spend her last days. She urgently needs to die in the company of someone she loves, so she asks her old friend to move into the room next door, to which Martha, in a genuine act of solidarity and empathy, agrees.

Loaded with opioids to lessen the physical pain and a lethal capsule (bought on the dark web) for her imminent escape from this world, both friends arrive at the idyllic house in the middle of a beautiful and leafy forest, the blinds open by remote control, thus showing a bucolic setting similar of mythical fairy tales. The days pass by talking about art, making daily confessions, remembering a mutual lover, watching their favorite movies like John Huston's "The Dead" which Martha knows by heart and recites an energetic dialogue about death. Martha admits that she has lost the ability to enjoy the pleasures of life, and that now she is indifferent to reading Hemingway or Faulkner.

Ingrid receives Martha's instruction that when the big red door of her room is closed at dawn, it will be the sign of her death. The story has some flashbacks that reveal how Martha witnessed the ashes of a taboo relationship while she was a war correspondent in Baghdad, also the story of how the terrible death of her daughter's father was, whom she met only as a teenager after he had fought in Vietnam, the latter very important for the outcome of the story when Martha's daughter appears on the scene.