Characters die in movies every day. Whether you’re watching a violent thriller or a death-bed tearjerker like “Steel Magnolias” or some of the more macabre meditations of Ingmar Bergman, you might say that the movies, in some grand collective way, are nothing less than a rehearsal for death. Yet it’s still rare to encounter a big-screen drama that grabs death by the horns, that looks it in the eye, that asks us to confront its daunting reality on every level the way Pedro Almodóvar’s lyrical and moving “The Room Next Door” does.
The movie, in form, is quite simple. It’s about two women, both in their early 60s, who’ve been friends for a long time but haven’t seen each other in years: Ingrid (Julianne Moore), an art-world author based in New York City, and Martha (Tilda Swinton), a former globe-trotting war correspondent for the New York Times who Ingrid reconnects with when she learns that Martha is in the hospital fighting a battle with cancer. Her illness is serious: It’s stage-three cervical cancer, and she’s undergoing a highly experimental immunotherapy treatment, which is the only chance she has. (In other words, not much of one.)
Some people in this situation might not choose to vent their feelings, but Martha isn’t like that. She knows she may die, and she’s frank and open and philosophical about it. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. She and Ingrid, we can see, were once close — and after a few catch-up encounters, they still are. The movie, while it has a sprinkling of other characters (like the man they both dated, a climate-change doomsayer played by John Turturro), is essentially a two-hander, a series of conversations between the two women that could almost be taking place on stage.
Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 American novel, “What Are You Going Through,” into his first English-language feature, Almodóvar has made a movie full of dialogue that has a ripe expository fervor. “The Room Next Door” is no mock Almodóvar soap opera, but it does have his love of voluble communication, of flamboyant feelings laid bare. The characters explain who they are, putting themselves right out there. Early on, Martha tells the story of how she wound up estranged from her daughter, Michelle, who she’d raised as a young single mother, and this wrenching flashback (set in the Vietnam era) is like a mini-movie all its own.
“The Room Next Door” is vibrantly shot (by Eduard Grau), notably when the characters move to a fancy modernist rented vacation home in the upstate country near Woodstock, NY. Mostly, though, it’s a movie in which Martha and Ingrid talk about death, and Martha finally figures out what she’s going to do about it. She has not stopped wanting to live. But she has grown tired of fighting the fear that she’s going to die.
Tilda Swinton has always had a face so distinctive — pale and severe, expressive in a way that’s almost translucent, with that aura she conjures of looking like the aristocratic elfin alien sibling of David Bowie — that we feel as if we know that face like our own. In “The Room Next Door,” Swinton’s face, along with her words, becomes an awesome instrument of inquiry. She gives a monumental performance, one that in its raw emotion, its pensive power, is worthy of comparison to the spirit and virtuosity of Vanessa Redgrave. She makes Martha a grounded woman who knows herself, and knows what she wants, but has landed in uncharted territory. She’s not prepared for this. Who is, really? But she’s going to take the journey and take us with her.
At a certain point, Martha decides that she’s had enough, and that she’s going to seize control of her destiny. She’s going to decide when she dies. “The Room Next Door” is not an “issue” movie (though it’s very much on the side of euthanasia). It’s a deceptively plainspoken but artful voyage into the river of emotion that accompanies the impulse to end one’s life. Martha has a plan, and it’s a relatively simple one, though it involves a pill she had to obtain, with some difficulty, on the dark web. And the challenge hardly ends there. As she and Ingrid move into the upstate home, a timetable emerges, and it infuses the film with a reality-based suspense. Will Ingrid wake up to find Martha’s bedroom door closed? That’s the code they’ve agreed on for the day of Martha’s reckoning. Moore’s Ingrid, warm and empathetic, will do whatever it takes to support her friend, which makes her part of a spiritual-ethical equation. She’s there to protect Martha, though she herself also needs to be protected (from the law).
Pedro Almodóvar, at 74, is no Spanish fatalist, but his films have become increasingly haunted by death. That’s why the comedy in them has mostly been burned away. Yet I would argue that this has not made him a downbeat artist. “The Room Next Door,” as driven by the scalding humanity of Swinton’s performance, lifts you up and delivers a catharsis. The movie is all about death, yet in the unblinking honesty with which it confronts that subject, it’s powerfully on the side of life.
From Variety US