In their latest film together, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore portray friends coping with a terminal illness. It’s far from sexy subject matter, and yet the two highly decorated actresses have still managed to leave sapphics swooning.

The Room Next Door, which comes from acclaimed gay director Pedro Almodóvar in his first feature-length English-language film, stars Swinton and Moore as two estranged friends brought closer by impending death.

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Based on the 2020 American novel What Are You Going Through by National Book Award-winning author Sigrid Nunez, the film follows Ingrid (Moore), a best-selling author who discovers that her former friend, the war correspondent Martha (Swinton), has cervical cancer. As Ingrid travels to reconnect with Martha, their rekindled friendship is tested when Martha asks for assisted suicide.

While the trailer for The Room Next Door does tease sapphic vibes—longing gazes, long embraces, a classical violin crooning in the background—none of it compares to the mere presence of Swinton and Moore. As much as their queer fans might love them, the two actresses clearly love each other more—albeit, sigh, platonically.

On Monday, The Room Next Door premiered at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, where it earned an 18-minute long standing ovation. But queer viewers were understandably distracted from prestige filmmaking by Swinton and Moore’s fond embraces on the red carpet.

Apparently, the internet is not alone in their sapphic imaginings. Swinton described to Deadline, “I think of this film as, in the first case, a love story between Ingrid and Martha… and also about evolution whether talking about war, climate catastrophe… There is faith in the film in the necessity and inevitability of evolution wherever it takes us.”

We’ll have to wait until the film comes to theaters in the US on December 20 to see how much of a love story The Room Next Door is. With that said, Almodóvar’s films often include queer themes. His most recent English-language short film, the gay cowboy Western Strange Way of Life starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke, was his answer to Brokeback Mountain.

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