Martha (Tilda Swinton) is a war correspondent who has covered 100 battles. When she is diagnosed with cancer, she challenges the enemy with the most advanced therapies with the same courage. But she loses, and all that remains is to wait for death.Before her job took her around the world, Martha had a dear friend, Ingrid (Julianne Moore). She asks her to be with her in the next days that will also be the last days of her life. Perhaps her daughter could have been the right person, but her life had no room for her, and now her daughter returns the favor with a polite indifference. Ingrid accepts.If in the first part of the film there is room for flashbacks and dense dialogues, it is in the sublimation of time and space that takes place in the second part that all of Almodovar’s genius unfolds, the staging becomes more synthetic and the melodrama is silenced, defused, no more flashbacks, no more stories but a lucid and methodical plan that takes shape far from everything, towards a further essentiality. Thus, Martha and Ingrid find themselves in another space where there is no memory, minimal, very elegant, very refined. In these spaces that change, in these words that say everything without ever weighing, Almodóvar finds the dimension of a true masterpiece, a lesson in cinema, direction, staging, writing. And,  it may be  in these spaces, and above all in these colors, that we may find the palette of the film with which Almodóvar took Venice by storm in 1988: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Those wonderful women were then on the threshold of adulthood, messed up  and full of energy. They are now Martha and Ingrid’s age,  perhaps it is only thanks to them and the beautiful music of composer and lifelong friend Alberto Iglesias that Almodóvar managed to find the strength to confront a theme that has always been so present in his films, but always stubbornly rejected in The Room Next Door.Teresa Cavina