Pedro Almodóvar has dealt with the subject of death throughout his career. Be it as an inciting incident in All About My Mother, a looming threat in Talk to Her, or a cheeky provocation in Matador, an existential darkness has always lurked behind the vibrant, expressive surfaces of his films. Centering the impermanence of human existence in the euthanasia drama The Room Next Door doesn’t indicate resignation to a “late period” style so much as it suggests a natural outgrowth of Almodóvar’s formidable body of work.
The Spanish auteur’s adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through begins with Julianne Moore’s Ingrid signing copies of her new book, On Sudden Deaths, describing it as her attempt to process the mystery of her subject. But not long into The Room Next Door, she soon finds that she must grapple with a non-spontaneous end. And the extended time that she spends sitting with the inevitability of death forces a reckoning for Ingrid that must be corporeal and emotional rather than simply intellectual. Almodóvar does the same from behind the camera as he explores the end of life on its distinct terms, not just as part of an Eros-Thanatos dichotomy that looks at death as a dark undergirding to sexual passion.
The Room Next Door features no obvious stand-in for the director to distill his evolving outlook into a palatable thesis. In this deft two-hander between the tremendous talents of Swinton and Moore, their characters have ample opportunities to justify and rationalize their perspectives. Moore’s Ingrid has such a remote relationship with death that she shoves it into her writing to avoid grappling with its complexities. Swinton’s Martha, on the other hand, understands it on a guttural level thanks to her many years served as a war correspondent.
Almodóvar, ever the non-judgmental arbiter, declares neither approach to be right or wrong. These personal philosophies are simply ways of coping with the inevitable end that awaits us all. Ingrid and Martha have shared plenty over the years of their friendship, including a charismatic lover in academic Damian (John Turturro), that unites them. But their departure when it comes to matters of death becomes harder to put aside as Martha’s cancer progresses.
Strange events precipitate the bonds of sisterhood in Almodóvar’s cinema, and The Room Next Door is no exception. While staring down death, Martha makes an unusual request of Ingrid, who at this point is closer to an acquaintance than a friend. She illegally procures a euthanasia pill and intends to slip peacefully into death. The intention isn’t to implicate Ingrid in her euthanasia by having her administer the medicine or witness the passage. Instead, Martha simply wishes for the comfort of knowing that she has a loving presence in an adjacent room.
Ingrid initially resists participation, mostly on philosophical grounds, but also because it involves serving as a companion for an unspecified amount of time at a house in upstate New York. Martha eventually secures Ingrid’s support by explaining her struggle in literary terms. She’s trapped inside the societal framing of cancer as a “fight” between a patient and the disease, which ultimately casts the final result as a test of an individual’s mettle. Ingrid’s refusal to bow to this narrative makes her a vintage Almodóvar taboo buster, albeit in death rather than life.
The Room Next Door mirrors that defiant spirit in the filmmaking itself. One of the key ways in which Almodóvar avoids making the subject feel like resignation to an imminent end is by using the project to break new artistic ground. Most obviously, the film marks his first full English-language feature, but he utilizes a new and savvy visual vocabulary as well.
Though the delicate dance around Ingrid’s looming decision lends itself to the Sirkian melodrama that Almodóvar effortlessly channels, the more somber subject matter leads him to work in a register closer to Ingmar Bergman’s intimate chamber dramas. As the women attempt to communicate across a divide, his gaze lingers on pointed silences and unexplained gestures. Given the tremendous nuances that Moore and Swinton can pack into a single facial contortion, the camera has no problem picking up those grace notes. Together, the actresses’ harmonizing illuminates the film’s subversive observation that only death can help mend a frayed friendship.
But while a spiritual connection between film and filmmaker is always evident across The Room Next Door, some signs of dissonance appear. A bit of emotion feels lost in translation from Almodóvar’s native tongue, resulting in dialogue that feels a bit stilted and lacking in the passion of his Spanish-language scripts. The psychodrama often dances on the surface level rather than penetrating deep into the souls of the characters. An attempt to connect the micro-scale passing of Martha to the macro-level destruction of the planet by climate change falls flat.
Still, it’s undoubtedly invigorating to have a filmmaker of Almodóvar’s stature and pedigree trying to see a beginning in the end. Now that he’s finally broken the seal on working in English after a series of false starts, perhaps a generous benefactor can revive his long-developing project A Manual for Cleaning Women with Cate Blanchett. It would be a fitting legacy for The Room Next Door to generate more life even as it circles the theme of death.
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