A woman dying of cervical cancer enlists a friend she hasn’t seen in years to accompany her on her journey from this world in The Room Next Door, now playing in Prague cinemas after winning the top prize Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in September. Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language feature debut (after last year’s 30-minute short Strange Way of Life) features two powerful performances from stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, but its solemn and straightforward narrative renders this one of the director’s minor works.
The Room Next Door stars Swinton as Martha, a former journalist and war correspondent who is slowly dying of cancer and quickly losing the will to fight. She reconnects with former colleague Ingrid (Moore), who has returned to New York City after a long sojourn in Paris, and as the two catch up, she makes a most unusual request. Martha has obtained a suicide pill on the dark web, and wants Ingrid to be in the titular room next door when she takes it.
The two aren’t close, but Martha has already asked three other friends to accompany her in her final days and they’ve all turned her down. She also doesn’t want to burden the estranged daughter she hasn’t seen in years. So while Ingrid hasn’t seen her in years, she agrees to see her through to the end, and the two and the two bond over Buster Keaton movies as Martha prepares to say goodbye at an upstate retreat she has booked for a few weeks.
There isn’t much more to The Room Next Door, which plays out in almost deceptively straightforward fashion. But Moore and Swinton are especially engaging in these roles, which are carefully observed within Almodóvar’s ethereal narrative, adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through. Despite the artificial setup, which doesn’t deal with the central topic of suicide in a substantive way, these characters feel genuine thanks to the performances and the director’s subtle hand.
But as Martha confronts her own death, The Room Next Door really only comes alive during two scenes. The first doesn’t even feature Swinton or Moore: it involves the story of the father of Martha’s children, told to her by his second wife and recreated in flashbacks. A Vietnam veteran suffering from PTSD, Fred (Alex Høgh Andersen) rushes into a burning building, responding to voices his wife (Victoria Luengo) cannot hear, and Almodóvar fills the scene with Hitchcockian tension as Alberto Iglesias’s score swells over Swinton’s narration.
The second scene is similarly tense, and involves a policeman (played in a scene-stealing cameo Alessandro Nivola) who interrogates Ingrid. Nivola’s character observes Ingrid in a similar manner as the director, but comes to much different conclusions.
There are some other tender moments in The Room Next Door apart from the central relationship between the leads, such as when Ingrid confides in her trainer (Alvise Rigo); he offers her an imaginary hug in lieu of the kind of physical contact that has been strictly prohibited by the gym. But multiple scenes between Ingrid and her friend/lover Damian (John Turturro), whom she lets in on Martha’s plan, add little to the story.
Swinton not only stars as Martha but also, briefly, her daughter Michelle, in a tender scene that showcases how Ingrid subtly observes similarities between the mother and her child despite their estrangement. But the choice to have Swinton play her own daughter is a distracting one, and takes away from what should otherwise be a quiet and touching scene.
Ingrid and Martha are distant, lonely characters who find a bond in the cold embrace of death; neither has close ties to family or friends, but nor do they seem to regret the decisions that have led them to this point. Almodóvar, as he does best, does not judge these characters but merely observes them, not in search of profound truth but rather a shared human essence.
The director also allows his protagonists to dictate the tone of the film, and like them, The Room Next Door becomes a somewhat chilly and impersonal experience. And while this doesn’t rank among Almodóvar’s finest features, a list topped by Talk to Her and All About My Mother, there’s still enough to like here to warrant a solid recommendation.
