THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (2024)
Starring Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola, Juan Diego Botto, Melina Matthews, Raúl Arévalo, Victoria Luengo, Esther McGregor, Alex Høgh Andersen and Alvise Rigo.
Screenplay by Pedro Almodóvar.
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar.
Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. 107 minutes. Rated PG-13.
Screened at the 2024 Philadelphia Film Festival.
It’s hard to believe that in a career that has lasted about 50 years – one that has had many international successes in the last 35-40 of those years – that The Room Next Door is the first time that beloved Spanish writer/director Pedro Almodóvar has made a feature film in English.
It’s actually been a few years coming. A couple of years ago he was working on one called A Manual for Cleaning Women with Cate Blanchett, but he decided not to do that one eventually. He also did a couple of 30-minute English-language shorts, one with Room Next Door co-star Tilda Swinton called “The Human Voice” in 2020 and one with Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal called “Strange Way of Life” in 2023.
However, The Room Next Door is his first full-length film in English, but other than the language it does not stray all that far from the director’s general style and vision. This is particularly of his later more serious work, but it even has some of the off-kilter surrealism of his earlier films.
It’s not his best work, but it’s far from his worst either.
The Room Next Door is a film about death, but strangely it is rather hopeful in many ways. Yes, it is taking on a very contentious subject in euthanasia for terminal patients, but it is also about friendship and living life to its fullest.
And, not surprisingly, the acting by the leads is spectacular.
Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through?, the story is actually mostly centered around a friend of a dying cancer patient, not the patient herself.
That friend is Ingrid (Moore), a writer who has recently returned from an extended stay in Europe and has authored a new book about her difficulties in dealing with death. While she is doing a book signing in Manhattan, she finds out that a former friend and colleague of hers – a war correspondent named Martha (Swinton) who she worked with years earlier when both were young – is in the hospital with cancer.
Although they hadn’t seen each other in years, Ingrid decides to go visit Martha. In upcoming weeks, as Martha is going through chemo and hoping for the best, their friendship rekindles. They end up spending a lot of time together, talking about their lives and loves and art and everything else.
Sadly, the chemo doesn’t work, and Martha learns that her cancer is terminal. She has a matter of months to live. She decides that she wants to take her death in her own hands – as she has done with her life all these years – and to go out on her own terms. She has gotten ahold of some black-market drugs, rented a huge home in the country, and wants to make something of a final vacation of the whole thing.
Then she asks Ingrid to come with her, to be there with her in the end. Ingrid, who has a fraught history with death (she wrote a whole book about it), is torn. She wants to be there for her friend, but at the same time she is not sure she is mentally up to the task. Of course, she ends up being there for her friend, who promises that they will try to have fun, and Ingrid will not have to be there for the last moments, she just needs to report the death.
It's a deep and kind of depressing storyline, but Almodóvar is able to infuse it with good times and humor. The upcoming death, while always in the background, is not the main thrust of The Room Next Door. It is more about the lives that led to it.
Jay S. Jacobs
Copyright ©2024 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: December 18, 2024.
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