‘Can’t get me if I get it first’: Prepared to die to cheat cancer
As someone who has been with a brother who died from cancer, and a best friend who died from cancer, I was worried this exploration of to be or not to be would be too raw for me. It wasn’t, which is a tribute to the director and the cast.
The death-or-death drama The Room Next Door is the English language debut of Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. It’s not as good as his previous film, the 2021 Spanish language drama Parallel Mothers, starring Penelope Cruz, but it’s still good.
How did the acclaimed director approach the challenge of making a movie not in his mother tongue? Casting two Oscar winners, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, was not a bad start. They are brilliant and the director uses a lot of close-ups to highlight this. This is their film, and their characters’ story.
I’ve described it as death and death because the central character, former war correspondent Martha Hunt (Swinton) has cervical cancer and has decided to end her own life. “Cancer can’t get me if I get me first.”
She asks her long-time friend Ingrid Parker (Moore), an author who has just published a book about her general fear of death, to be with her when she dies, to be in the room next door.
Martha reported from war zones in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. “This is another war,’’ she tells her friend. “I am not afraid of it but I don’t want to die alone.”
It’s an exacting request, and not only because Ingrid is terrified by the very idea of death, or that she will have to lie to the police once the deed is done.
The two, who met when working on a magazine in New York, have not been in touch for a long time. Martha admits without embarrassment that she asked closer friends first but they said no.
Ingrid agrees — though it’s clear she hopes her friend will change her mind and not take the suicide pill she acquired via the dark web — and the two rent a home near Woodstock, two hours out of New York.
They hang out, watch movies and talk. For Martha it becomes somewhat of a confessional. She knows she has not been the best mother to her now-adult daughter. For Ingrid it is more like a baptism. She learns something from Martha’s decision not to “live” through a tortuous cancer.
Martha delivers a passionate speech rejecting the idea that people who decide to die rather than fight cancer are defeatist. “There are lots of ways to live inside a tragedy,’’ Ingrid tells Damian Cunningham (John Turturro, strong in a minor role), a climate change activist who is a former lover of Martha’s and then Ingrid’s.
This film is Almodovar’s adaptation of the 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, by American Sigrid Nunez. It’s the source material but there are other literary nods, particularly to James Joyce’s The Dead, one of the greatest short stories. The set-up — two friends, one with terminal cancer — is also reminiscent of Andrew O’Hagan’s outstanding 2020 novel Mayflies.
There is a comic undercurrent, sometimes deadpan, sometimes close to slapstick. When Martha misplaces the suicide pill, she says, “Life always surprises you”. For the slapstick, wait for the scene when Ingrid goes to a gym and works out with a handsome young personal trainer.
As someone who has been with a brother who died from cancer, and a best friend who died from cancer, I was worried this exploration of to be or not to be would be too raw for me.
It wasn’t, which is a tribute to the director and the cast. It’s not exactly a happy film about death but nor is it a depressingly sad one.
The Room Next Door (M)
107 minutes
In cinemas. Advance screenings December 20-22 ahead of general release on Boxing Day