THE ROOM NEXT DOOR ★★★
(M) 107 minutes
Death’s embrace looms in the new film from Pedro Almodovar, a showcase for stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in what is the English-language feature debut of the Spanish master. It is an overwhelming subject, felt through the plot’s focus on euthanasia or the way it makes the characters sometimes deliver blunt pronouncements. What ensures is an artful but nonetheless untoward movie, a chamber piece cold to the touch even as the final flames burn.
Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore play old friends who reconnect in The Room Next Door. Credit:
“This is another war,” combat zone journalist Martha Hunt (Swinton) tells her old friend, novelist Ingrid Parker (Moore), when the latter learns that Martha is terminally ill with cervical cancer. Reunited in New York after decades on their own paths, the former downtown Manhattan pals from the 1980s soon skip past catching up in favour of planning a goodbye. Dreading the looming agony, Martha has illegally procured a pill so she can time her passing. She just needs Ingrid to be her companion for the surrender.
The Room Next Door’s circling of mortality is not entirely a surprise given Almodovar’s recent concerns: 2019’s Pain and Glory was about an ageing filmmaker unable to work due to chronic suffering. But that earlier film had an evocative suggestiveness that has somewhat dissipated here. The acceptance that builds and abates between the two women doesn’t preclude them from performatively delivering the dialogue instead of exchanging it.
I hungered for some earthiness, a flash of idiom. Working in English for his adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through applies a formality to Almodovar’s words. That mirrors his precise visual compositions, which are keyed to his signature reds and Swinton’s vertiginous face. The expressiveness Almodovar finds in a tracking shot of the two women reclining on sun lounges at the upstate holiday home Martha has rented is sublime, but a counterpoint would help.
Some of the dialogue feels stage in Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door, which is his first English film. Credit:
At one point Martha and Ingrid reminisce about a lover from their youth who went from seeing the former to the latter, and the lines somehow sound like a bureaucratic assessment. Swinton and Moore make the best of these linguistic strictures, and in other ways the pair flourish. The tone’s formal reserve leaves space they can subtly project into, so Moore’s Ingrid wrestles with her doubts even as she dutifully waits for her friend to choose her moment, while Swinton’s Martha sways from anger to acceptance.
As much as Almodovar has a deep appreciation for golden era Hollywood melodrama, where a Bette Davis would gloriously succumb to an incurable ailment and leave the audience bereft, The Room Next Door has a more twisty, ruminative momentum. Several times the story hints at different films it could become, be it describing the broken bond between Martha and her now-adult daughter, Michelle, or a Hitchcockian thriller where Martha is coolly testing Ingrid’s resolve.
It is fascinating to see a filmmaker whose work has resonated with joyousness and defiance since the 1980s grapple with existential fears, but it is not always fulfilling. John Turturro appears as the aforementioned lover, writer Damian Cunningham, who now offers Ingrid legal advice before railing against the looming climate apocalypse and his becalmed sex life.
It’s worth noting all these characters are privileged intellectuals. Is that the only kind of American Almodovar is familiar with?
Given it won the Golden Lion at September’s Venice International Film Festival, The Room Next Door plainly has its devotees, but I found it more a treatise than transporting. The pleasures and the perils are mixed up together, awkwardly elbowing the narrative forward. Almodovar seems to appreciate how an ending can encompass so much. “There are lots of ways,” Ingrid eventually decides, “to live inside a tragedy”.
The Room Next Door is released in cinemas on December 26.
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