The Room Next Door
La habitación de al lado

Pedro Almodóvar's first English Language feature is an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez's novel What Are You Going Through. Julianne Moore stars as a successful author named Ingrid, who reconnects with her old friend Martha, a former combat reporter played by Tilda Swinton. Martha is dying of cervical cancer and refuses to subject herself to another round of treatments. She plans to go out on her own terms and has secured the means to do so. But she doesn't want to die alone. She wants to go out in a beautiful setting with someone she loves in the room next door. Ingrid isn't her first choice, especially considering the author's latest autobiographical novel is about her personal fear of death, but she is, in many respects, the best person to honor this request.

The first half hour of The Room Next Door is so awkwardly written and so offputtingly artificial it's hard to enter the world of this movie at all. Almodóvar's English dialogue feels like he's written subtitles rather than dialogue. There are several scenes in the first act that, were this not made by an unquestioned "auteur," would certainly have been cut so the film could arrive at Martha's request of Ingrid much faster. The New York of The Room Next Door is also a complete fabrication; even scenes that take place in locations I've been in seem as artificial as the maladroit dialogue. Some of the characters' actions in these early scenes make it extremely difficult for us to relate to them as actual people rather than intellectual concepts, especially a forgetful slip of Martha's that, even with her "chemo brain," strains all credibility and undermines the weight of the movie's subject.

However, as soon as Martha and Ingrid settle into the impossibly gorgeous upstate Air B&B Ingrid has rented to spend her final days, the movie settles into the vibe I wish it had been able to establish from the get-go. As if by magic, all the artifice that kept me from entering the story slowly transforms into a key element of the film's contemplative aesthetic. As we spend time with Ingrid and Martha pleasantly cohabitating, basking in the warm sun, watching old movies, and having conversations, we find ourselves musing on the same existential questions these characters have been fixating upon.

The always-welcome John Turturro, a distinctly New York actor (which sets him apart from everything else in this movie), has a great supporting role as the former lover of both Martha and Ingrid. He's the only person Ingrid takes into her confidence about Martha's request, and it's a good thing she does, as watching the film, you start working out in your mind how you would handle certain things differently if you'd asked a friend to be present at your suicide. Turturro's Damian is a boorish professor who can't help hectoring everyone about climate change and the end of civilization, even those he's trying to seduce. Turturro provides both grounding and comic relief to the solemn proceedings, and there are some other nice turns by actors in individual scenes, but the film belongs to the two leads.

Swinton and Moore are about as perfect casting as you could imagine for both Almodóvar's first English feature and his latest musing about mortality. Each has a distinctive screen persona that fits perfectly into the director's milieu, and at sixty-four, they are both old enough to have lived rich, full, complex lives and young enough for a terminal cancer diagnosis to feel insultingly cruel and unfair. They're also consummate and unusual actresses who can credibly deliver dialogue that feels typed rather than spoken. While, as a whole, The Room Next Door doesn't hold together as well as Almodóvar’s 2019 semi-autobiographical Pain & Glory, it ends up being more emotionally resonant. Both films eschew the writer/director's penchant for overt melodrama in favor of quietly spending time with their protagonist's pain, pleasures, and reflections on the life they've led.