In life and in cinema, Pedro Almodóvar likes to talk about death. When people aren’t losing their faculties in his films––like going blind (Folle… folle… fólleme Tim!), falling into comas (Talk to Her), or falling apart altogether (The Skin I Live In)––they dwell on the afterlife (a son’s in All About My Mother, his own in Pain and Glory) or are already there (Volver), though never is it a cause for undue solemnity. Speaking in a New Yorker profile in 2016, the director recalled watching the local woman in his hometown of Calzada chatting as they tended to their families’ graves. “Death disappeared,” Almodóvar explained, “because the important thing was the flowers, the conversations.”
That sentiment is alive and well in the director’s latest death film. His first-ever English-language feature, adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through mostly in structure only, The Room Next Door stars Tilda Swinton as the terminally ill named Martha who decides she will go out on her own terms. The plan is to buy a euthanasia pill on the dark web, rent a spacious modernist house in the woods of upstate New York, watch some DVDs (Buster Keaton and John Huston are on the menu), and wait until the time feels right. The story is told from the perspective of a novelist friend, Ingrid (a delightful Julianne Moore), whom Martha asks to accompany her in her final moments. While there, they will visit a bookstore and talk about Martha’s time as a war reporter. Ingrid will meet a man (John Turturro) they both once had flings with. All in all, not a bad way to go.
Speaking as someone who strayed from the Almodóvar flock some films ago, The Room Next Door presents a welcome surprise. His recent output of shorts and medium-length films (Strange Way of Life and The Human Voice) pointed towards a director paring down in all the wrong ways. The Room Next Door is the other kind, the closest he’s come to an exercise in late style: it’s succinct, light on its feet, totally earnest, and––in spite of some indulgent conversations on art and writing––never feels like it’s trying too hard. Would an artist who felt they still had something to prove write a scene like the one in which Martha stares out the window of her hospital room, quoting Joyce while pink snowflakes gently fall over the Manhattan skyline? That the sequence works is as much a testament to the strength of the performances (watch out for Moore’s close-up in the scene, a real classic of the genre) as it is to the director’s conviction.
There’s a similar clarity to the film’s central theme of choosing life over tragedy. Take the inclusion of Turturro’s character, who lectures on environmental doomsday scenarios; or Martha’s choice not to be in her home for her final days because she wants them to be filled with new things, not memories and nostalgia. Almodóvar’s vibrant aesthetic also seems to be in on the act: the fact that Martha’s acacia yellow outfit could have appeared in any of the director’s recent work takes nothing away from its emotional significance here. Room Next Door‘s hammiest move (and there are a couple early flashbacks that give it a run for its money) is to use the most famous lines from Joyce’s “The Dead” as a recurring motif: spoken once by Martha, once by Ingrid, and once by Donal McCann. As a Dubliner, I’ll allow it.
The Room Next Door premiered at the Venice Film Festival and will open on December 20.