The-Room-Next-Door-movie

The Room Next Door

Last year, Pedro Almodóvar released his first ever film in English: a short film called Strange Way of Life, a queer-tinged western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as cowboys in the old West. Because it’s an Almodóvar movie, it actually got something close to a real theatrical release – where they charged full price tickets – for the thirty-one minute movie. I never saw that film though the word on it was tepid. This year, we get an entire feature in English, The Room Next Door. The idea of making a film outside his native Spanish has been a long-gestating interest. He beautifully translated Alice Munro into Spanish for Julieta, and tried (and failed) to make an English-language adaptation of Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women years ago.

The film is based on a popular American novel, What Are You Going Through, by Sigrid Nuñez. So you can see that, at least as a reader, Almodóvar has an interest in the writing of many a North American woman. That’s probably not surprising when you’ve seen his Spanish films. Where Berlin and Munro wrote short stories, Nuñez writes short novels, the kind of thing that gives the beloved filmmaker free reign to place his prints on the material. The Room Next Door is a surprisingly funny film about some deadly serious stuff. Tilda Swinton is a former war journalist dying of cervical cancer, and Julianne Moore is her friend, a best-selling author. The prospect of two actors as brilliant as Swinton and Moore tearing into an Almodóvar script is an irresistible premise on its own. The Room Next Door gives them both something real to play.

Moore is Ingrid Parker, who learns on her latest book tour that a formerly close friend, Martha Hunt (Swinton), is in a local NYC hospital receiving cancer treatments. Ingrid and Martha haven’t spoken in years, but Ingrid goes straight to see her after learning the news. Upon arrival, the friendship is reignited, and they immediately launch into long-form descriptions of their lives since they last saw each other. Facing death, Martha has regrets over her life and her behavior as a mother. Estranged from her daughter, Martha has no family to look after her. Their relationship for so long dormant, Martha now asks Ingrid to fill that void, to be the company that she’s lacking. Against her better judgment, Ingrid agrees, visiting her friend frequently at the hospital and in her home.

When Martha’s case becomes terminal, she makes a decision: she’s going to travel upstate and take a suicide pill that she discovered on the dark web. The one catch? She needs someone to be with her when she does it, so she asks Ingrid. Aghast, Ingrid claims that there must be a closer friend than her to carry this burden. Martha replies: there are, but they’ve all said no before I asked you. Martha impresses upon Ingrid’s kindness. Her illness does not dispel her vanity. The same clueless egotism that has caused a rift with her daughter now blinds her from seeing just how much she is asking of Ingrid. Still, Ingrid agrees to help, and they take a trip up to an upscale cabin in upstate New York, where Martha warns that one day – and she won’t say which day that will – she will be gone.

I’d say that Almodóvar’s three-film stretch of Julieta in 2016, Pain & Glory in 2019, and then finally Parallel Mothers in 2021, represents the best run of the veteran Spanish filmmaker’s career. The films have a weathered quality that only feels more effective when considering the blistering provocation of his earlier decades of work. The Room Next Door falls short of that standard. No doubt, there is still an adjustment period for Almodóvar directing in a different language. His script is pretty straightforward, missing the flourishes of surrealism that occasionally mark his more adventurous films. The heightened nature of his dialogue can sometimes sound tinny in the significantly unromantic language of English.

But the compositions throughout the film are just as exquisite as any film he’s ever made. It helps that he found the most Almodóvar-ian upstate New York cabin ever. Incredibly modern and sparse (annoyingly so, to Ingrid), its floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the beautiful landscape and the walls, colored in pungent red and green, create their own remarkable imagery with Swinton and Moore in the foreground. The movie is sometimes fighting against itself, but the performances of Swinton and Moore ground the story. Martha’s eccentricity rubs uncomfortably against Ingrid’s passive generosity. The tension never explodes, even in moments where it feels like it should, but stays present over every conversation. Our two legendary actors keep that balance over the course of the movie, strengthening what occasionally is a lackluster script.

John Turturro arrives as a mutual friend of the two women. He’s also a published author, and in his advanced age, he’s become a spouter of climate doom. Turturro gets a monologue in the middle of the film worthy of Schrader’s First Reformed. It’s those pops of character that separates Almodóvar from the other great stylists of his generation. Even in his less-lauded films, he manages moments of incredible grace. The movie’s end holds a bold creative decision that I’m not certain it really earns. I give it points for audacity, if nothing else. Learning this won Venice’s Golden Lion over the likes of The OrderThe Brutalist, and I’m Still Here is a bit of a head-scratcher, though I can see many being moved by its warm views of mortality and friendship. Part of this still feels like an exercise more than a finished project, but it’s a gorgeous one at that.

 

Written for the Screen and Directed by Pedro Almodóvar