Quiet, respectable, endearing, and brilliant.
There are many reasons to choose The Room Next Door as your next film to watch: one being it’s the first English-language feature film of perhaps the greatest living Spanish director, Pedro Almodóvar, and the other being its star quality in Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore as the leads. Technically this review could stop right here and I’d have probably encouraged more box office sales, but then I couldn’t talk about death, which is clearly what the auteur would like us to do.
The film opens with a camera shot high above an author we are about to learn is Ingrid (Moore). She is signing books for a queue of readers, and the momentary omniscient view suggests that what we are about to watch is a work of fiction, created by an artist, and this is the artists’ world, not ours. It feels suited to melodrama, and that’s exactly what’s going to take place.
In the queue is an old friend of Ingrid’s, who tells her their mutual friend Martha (Swinton) has cancer. Shocked, Ingrid visits Martha in hospital, both women apologetic for letting the years pass without contacting one another, and then they fall easily into the comfortable space of old and dear friends. They meet a few more times, Ingrid an obvious support for Martha, whose experimental treatment is no longer working. Death is imminent. When Martha asks Ingrid to come to the country with her and be there – at least in the room next to hers – as she swallows her end-of-life pill, Ingrid tells her she’s terrified of death and has to think about it, but she’s a compassionate person, so she agrees.
Unlike the earlier farcically camp films or the later intricately plotted ones, The Room Next Door is a departure for Almodóvar, as its characters are not on the fringes of any society and the narrative is very straightforward. How does one deal with death? The film is mostly dialogue focused on the topic at hand, but sometimes there are odd diversions that are brief but monumental, adding surprising texture to the narrative. As a backdrop to their conversations, the musical score is affected. It’s like something you’d hear in old black and white film noir, though it’s offset by vivid colours – the bright plum bathrobe against the lime green chair, the bright red Dodge against the dismal back road, the pink sunset in the city, the blue sunset in the mountains, the endless fresh flowers – and there you have it: it is an Almodóvar film.
The chemistry between Swinton and Moore is pure and gentle magic, and apart, they’re equally convincing. Swinton’s Martha, as a former war correspondent for the New York Times, is tough and assured, but she’s also grappling and vulnerable, and it’s not so much the script that portrays this as it is her telling face. She’s truly an emotional tour de force. Moore’s Ingrid is the opposite. Her nature is lighter, more accommodating, but under the circumstances she’s helpless and grieving, and completely conflicted. The acting from these two legends is, in a word, phenomenal. Even John Turturro’s minor role as ex-lover to both women and doomsday lecturer on climate change is noteworthy, his obsession with the earth’s dire condition acting as another view on death.
Based on Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through, The Room Next Door is a slow burn, not quite what you’d expect from the 75-year-old Almodóvar, and given his age, I like to think of it not as a deviation, but as a transition. It’s a deeply, deeply moving film.
Reviewed by Heather Taylor Johnson
The Room Next Door opens on Boxing Day.
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