‘Room’ to Move
Average Almodóvar is still better than the best of many.
The Room Next Door
Director: Pedro Almodóvar • Writer: Pedro Almodóvar, based on the book by Sigrid Nunez
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola
Spain • 1hr 46mins
Opens Hong Kong Feb 6 • IIB
Grade: B
Acclaimed war correspondent Martha (Tilda Swinton) is treating an aggressive form of cancer when old friend and acclaimed author Ingrid (Julianne Moore) comes to visit at the hospital. They get to chatting and reconnect just like that, and when Martha learns her treatment is not working, she decides she’s going to be the one who determines when and how she dies. Martha is estranged from her daughter Michelle, and so after some debate, Ingrid – whose last book was about her fear of dying – agrees to help; to be there in the room next door when the time comes. Advising Ingrid to be careful and lawyer up ASAP is Damian (John Turturro), a dude both women had a fling with back in the day.
Everyone’s calling the latest gorgeously colour-blocked missive from Pedro Almodóvar “The suicide movie” and that’s fair – to a point. The Room Next Door (La habitación de al lado), like a great deal of Almodóvar’s work, pivots on a couple of women wrestling with what it means to be alive, how to be alive, and what they may or may not leave behind. Legacy was front and centre in Parallel Mothers, as it was in the rare male-centred Pain and Glory. Almodóvar’s focus has shifted and matured as he’s grown older – away from the frothy, youthful provocation of Matador and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! – and it’s what’s kept him so consistently worth seeking out. So to boil Next Door down to a single, reductive log line is misleading. It could also be argued this is the next step into more overtly political filmmaking by a traditionally apolitical (in text) artist. Parallel Mothers was essentially the first time the Spanish Civil War and Francisco Franco were ever acknowledged in his films, and here Almodóvar is tackling the thorny subject of the right to die. And a bunch of other stuff. Not all of it works, but it hits more targets than it misses.
If you’re unsure it’s Almodóvar…
The Room Next Door is Almodóvar’s first English-language feature – he dabbled in the gay cowboy short Strange Way of Life in 2023 – and even if the script was written in a second or third language, actors like Swinton, Moore and Turturro have it within them to raise the material. So the stilted, unnatural dialogue and overly thoughtful discussions of life, mortality, sex and love are just that: stilted and unnatural, and occasionally straight boneheaded. When Martha and Ingrid talk about a painter who shot herself in the stomach after her partner died of stomach cancer, we don’t need them to say, “The symmetry of it, shooting herself in the stomach after he got cancer in the same spot.” Ya think? That’s clumsy in any language, and Next Door is sadly loaded with aggressive contemplations of the meaning of the universe. The film is ultimately an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional one, which is odd given both the subject matter and the filmmaker.
However, the back half of the film is more affecting than the set-up, with the old friends debating the impact Martha’s death will have on Ingrid, whether or not Ingrid is strong enough to handle the responsibility and why Martha isn’t strong enough to be alone. Martha rents an ultra-stylish Airbnb house in upstate New York and takes the room with the deep red door. Ingrid moves into a lower level suite and her daily climb up the stairs to see if Martha’s door is closed – the sign they’ve agreed on that signals her death overnight – becomes the film’s most emotionally charged motif as they quite joyfully reflect on Martha’s life: regrets and joys, failures and triumphs. It’s not sad, and perhaps it needn’t be. In fact, the film is almost defiant in how not sad it is. The Room Next Door isn’t about death. It’s about life.
But it’s still bracingly intellectual – it’s nigh impossible for Swinton not to be smart – and all manner of philosophical debates enter the conversations, making The Room Next Door a rambling meditation on a number of topics, among them sex and sexuality, motherhood and career and religion, with endless comments on art. The right and wrong, the morality, of Martha’s choice enters the picture relatively late in the story, after she’s dead when a local cop (Alessandro Nivola) tries to poke holes in Ingrid’s version of events. On top of that, and regardless of the film’s fair share of moving moments, it’s much more distant, almost clinical, than Almodóvar usually is, and the reconnection of the two friends never feels truly grounded in anything believable or recognisable. Most of us have that one friend you don’t see for years at a time, but when you finally get into the same room with them it’s like you saw them the week before. We don’t feel that kind of bond between Ingrid and Martha as much as we should and it neuters the film’s impact. That’s not to say that the impeccable visuals by cinematographer Edu Grau (Tom Ford’s A Single Man, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F) don’t capture that Almodóvarian aesthetic perfectly, or lend a significant hand to the storytelling, or that the performances by Swinton and Moore aren’t strong enough (duh!) to give all that intellectualism some guts – though Turturro’s Damian is more efficiently drawn in a fraction of the screen time. It’s just not as humanitarian and brainy as truly peak Almodóvar.