Taken together, Almodóvar’s last three films—Pain and Glory, Parallel Mothers, and now The Room Next Door—solve one another, forming a sort of triptych about what it means to make art at the end of a life. Each asks what we leave behind in the world, what lasts, what remains, and together they form an almost scandalously hopeful answer: art is enough, and equal to love, and no different from it.
