The film *The Room Next Door* focuses on themes of friendship, mortality, and companionship between two women. Despite director Pedro Almodóvar's previous works featuring trans characters, this film does not include any transsexual characters or themes, marking a departure from his earlier, more overtly queer-inclusive narratives.

The movie does not contain any action or adventure elements.

The film's characters, including Martha and Ingrid, maintain the same gender as established in the source novel, What Are You Going Through. No character's on-screen gender differs from their original canonical portrayal.

The film's major characters, Martha, Ingrid, and Damian, were not explicitly defined by race in the source novel. The casting of white actors for these roles is consistent with their implied Western backgrounds and the film's narrative focus on a specific social group, thus not constituting a race swap.