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The Room Next Door is the first English-language feature film from Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, who's best known for his collaborations with Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas on movies like Volver and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Like the last film Almodóvar made with Banderas, 2019's Pain and Glory, The Room Next Door also questions how we deal with aging bodies in decline, but the latter takes the theme further.
The film stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton as Ingrid and Martha, old friends and former colleagues who reconnect after Ingrid learns from a mutual acquaintance that Martha is undergoing treatment for cancer in a nearby New York City hospital. Ingrid pays her a visit and the pair reconnect, catching up on lost time and bonding over shared memories from their days working on the same magazine. When Martha finds out that her experimental treatment hasn't worked, she refuses to undergo any further rounds and instead purchases a euthanasia pill from the dark web. She plans to take it during a trip upstate, but there's a catch – she doesn't want to die alone, and she wants Ingrid to be in the room next door while she does it.
A matter of love and death
Ingrid is a writer whose latest book is about coming to terms with death – and her inability to do so – and Martha's proposition causes her considerable mental turmoil. On the other hand, Martha was a war correspondent before she got ill and was surrounded by death, or the threat of it, which we see in flashbacks as she regales Ingrid with tales from her hospital bed.
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If Parallel Mothers, Almodóvar's last film that followed (among other things) a woman's quest to excavate a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War in her hometown, was about memory, The Room Next Door is about legacy. What do we leave behind of ourselves? What do we leave behind for others – our loved ones, and the world at large? Via John Turturro's character, Ingrid and Martha's shared ex-boyfriend Damien, the film voices anxieties about neoliberalism, the far right, and the climate crisis, and the film culminates with a haunting shot of two characters lying on sun loungers as unseasonable snow begins to fall.
And, of course, The Room Next Door is always thinking about death with dignity, asking whether such a thing is possible and if we really can ever go in peace, on our own terms. While that may sound like heavy fare, it doesn't feel like it when you're watching Moore and Swinton on screen, their magnetic performances and chemistry accentuated by Almodóvar's signature pops of primary color in the costume and production design.
The linguistic shift from Spanish to English doesn't change Almodóvar's trademark stylistic dialogue and melodramatic flair, either. "I didn’t want the story to be necessarily a sad story or a boring story, I wanted death to also be vibrant and alive," the director said in an interview with IndieWire. "It is part of Tilda’s character’s vitality that she decides to take death into her own hands."
Swinton and Moore anchor the movie's big, difficult questions with human, nuanced performances, keeping grand philosophical issues grounded in a very real portrayal of friendship and grief. During one of the film's earlier scenes, Martha tells Ingrid about an aid worker she met during a journalistic assignment in Baghdad who stayed put through the city’s evacuation in order to stay with his lover, stating that he used sex as a shield against war. In a similar way, Martha uses Ingrid’s friendship as a shield against her sickness and her impending death – until the shield becomes more of a cushion. Ultimately, Ingrid’s presence becomes something softer and less avoidant as the film progresses: she’s not blocking Martha from her reality, but just making things a little easier.
The Room Next Door is out now in UK cinemas and arrives in US theaters on December 20. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
