It’s always a moment for cautious excitement when a celebrated non-English language filmmaker decides to make the jump into translation. Pedro Almodovar, arguably the most acclaimed Spanish director alive, has dabbled in English with a pair of solid shorts, The Human Voice and A Strange Way of Life, but a feature is an entirely different beast. And for a legendary storyteller of women’s struggles to collaborate with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, two of their generation’s most daring performers, almost feels too good to be true.
Based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez, The Room Next Door sees the pair play two friends who have reunited after a period of separation. Ingrid (Moore) is a celebrated author who has just written a book about her smothering fear of death, while Martha (Swinton) is a war correspondent fighting cervical cancer. Soon after reuniting, Martha finds out that her disease is terminal. She doesn’t want to spend her final days in ceaseless agony. So, she asks Ingrid to be her companion for the end of her life. She doesn’t need an accomplice to help her die by suicide. She just doesn’t want to be alone. A friend in the room next door will be enough to help her be strong.
A few hours after The Room Next Door screened for critics at TIFF, it took home the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. One of the true kings of European cinema finally got to win one of the major awards of the European film festival circuit. It’s hard to argue with the jury’s choice, as his latest feels like a signature Almodovar work without losing its potency or melancholy. If you’re a fan of Pedro’s work then much of what’s on display here will feel familiar: his use of deep greens and reds in his cinematography; highly mannered dialogue that feels both cheeky and philosophical; and the feminine heart and soul presented to us with undiluted respect.
Martha and Ingrid talk to one another and themselves in ways that sometimes feel stilted, even in the mouths of these phenomenal actresses. Almodovar has never been a realist and it’s more evident to our English-as-a-first-language brains when presented to us in translation, stripped away of our lingering ideas of exoticism with Spanish dialogue. In one scene, Martha says of her estranged daughter that “by puberty, she had carved out quite an abyss between us. It defined her adolescence.” It’s so drily delivered that it could have been taken from a Yorgos Lanthimos black comedy. Like Almodovar’s most famous works, this story has one foot in the world of the soap opera, a heightened emotional and rhetorical approach to very real issues and the real people who encounter them (the view from Martha’s gorgeous apartment is clearly a studio backdrop, which only adds to the theatricality of this two-person play set-up.) Why wouldn’t two worldly and artistically minded older women speak of death with the pseudo-academic tone of a broadsheet newspaper? It’s how they would have written about it.
Martha invites Ingrid to accompany her to a stunning house in upstate New York where she wishes to die. It’s a scenic wonder, teeming with life in the surrounding woods and scored by the melodies of birdsong. Once they are alone, the waiting game begins. Moore veers between warm camaraderie with her good friend and being a tightly wound knot. Every second of bliss spent with this person she loves, watching films and discussing books, is one second closer to her death. She wakes every morning in a panic, wondering if Martha has chosen the night before to end it all. With this, however, comes moments of true joy. Their friendship evolves into a love of immense strength and poignancy. This is the kind of stuff you come to an Almodovar for. His depictions of the bonds between women, often unexpected, are unbeatable. When other characters show up, however briefly, they’re an intrusion on Martha and Ingrid’s world. John Turturro, always welcome on our screens, plays a nihilistic author who both women once had romances with and who remains a good friend of Ingrid. He’s a reminder of the world outside their new fortress, but also of its cruelties, the topic of his unpopular lectures on how the world is falling apart and humans won’t do anything to stop it.
While the film is melancholy (with frequent moments of humour), The Room Next Door is undoubtedly steeped in death. Almodovar is now in his 70s, and his last few films have been fascinated by the topic of mortality. Pain and Glory, one of his greatest efforts, was his semi-autobiographical portrait of an artist not unlike himself, wondering if his best days are behind him. In Parallel Mothers, the heroine’s experiences as a new mother are shown in conjunction with her search for accountability for the massacre of her home village during the Spanish Civil War. The Room Next Door hints at a near-apocalyptic future, not just through Turturro’s ideas but of a world in flux. The scorching summer of New York is interrupted by snowfall, something both Martha and Ingrid view with resigned pleasure. If the world were to end, at least someone gets to beat it to the punch.
Death comes for us all, and if we’re lucky, we get to meet it on our own terms. That’s what binds The Room Next Door together, that journey towards acceptance of that which we wish weren’t true. Almodovar’s portrait of the things that make life worth it (and worth dying for) will linger long after the snow stops falling.
The Room Next Door had its North American premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It is scheduled to have a limited release in December and will open wide in January 2025.