The Room Next Door

dir: Pedro Almodóvar

2024

Who else was excited by the prospect of watching another film by Pedro Almodóvar, one of the world’s (not just Spain’s) great directors for the better part of the last 45 years? What about getting to watch his first film in English, with two greats in lead roles, being Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, at the peak of their powers? What about that it’s based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez?

Nothing? No-one? Huh.

I remember when this was playing the film festivals, there was this thing called “buzz” about the new film by Almodóvar. And then the flick was screened, and picked up for international distribution, got an award or two, and everyone was very polite about it. It’s like when you have a new article come out, or get something new published, and people are like “yes, that was a thing that happened.” It doesn’t mean it’s bad, or that people are embarrassed to be associated with you. It’s that it happened, they saw it / read it / endured it, it’s over, and now we can get on with our lives.

I don’t actually know why this didn’t connect with more people, unless it’s the issue of the subject matter, maybe in a religious context, but then Almodóvar’s films have never shied away from controversial topics like murder, sexual abuse and violence, intimate partner violence, child abuse, LGBTQI+ themes etc etc. Few (successful, Spanish) directors have opposed the Catholic Church, the religious establishment, the previous appeasers of fascism as much as Almodóvar.

I’m going to stop saying his name now. Maybe he’s not as popular as he was. I mean, I haven’t truly loved his films since maybe Volver all those years ago with Penelope Cruz in the lead role, but I’ve admired his subsequent films, and I admire this one.

I didn’t love it, it didn’t deeply resonate with me, I didn’t love the performances, but I enjoyed it as much as one can enjoy a film about one person who’s dying from cancer and wants to end things before it gets too much worse, and another person who wants to help their friend but can’t handle the idea of death at all.

It’s not a barrel of laughs, that’s for fucking sure, but neither is it a morose or depressing experience either. None of the harsh realities of what being in that state are depicted; it’s more about what a person thinks about, chooses to articulate, or how they make peace with their lives and the people they care about in the time they have left.

It’s also, now that I think about it with a bit more depth, one of those films that people can find alienating, because it’s about choosing to just die already and not using the terminology that people feel like they should use talking about “fighting” their cancers rather than giving in like the cowards they are. People live, people die, and rarely does it have that much to do with their motives, intentions, or resilience. Resilient people die every day. Strong people die even more often.

Obviously, I think the world of Tilda Swinton, in that it’s obvious to anyone that has read any review I’ve ever written of something with her in it that I think she’s like the greatest living actor, who’s probably way better than most of the dead ones. It doesn’t mean I love everything she’s in. Sometimes I loathe a film because of how poorly a script or a filmmaker works with her (or doesn’t). Sometimes, like in a fairly recent flick where she played two key roles in the same flick (The Eternal Daughter, the abundance of Swinton can be exasperating, essentially since the director was using her as a sock puppet to work out her own frustrations with her relationship with her own mother, which didn’t end up being that interesting or engaging for me (sorry!)

This film has the perfect amount of Tilda Swinton in it, though I have to say I didn’t love her American accent. It probably sounds great to Americans, but to me it was something of an obstacle to really connecting with this character. Either character.

There is probably the perfect amount of Julianne Moore in this flick as well. She is a consistently great performer, with a long list of stinkers too (whenever I feel like I’m overpraising her, I just remember her performance in a terrible flick called Freedomland, and then I feel reset). She has the somewhat harder role here, I think, as Ingrid, the friend attending to the dying friend.

Much of Swinton’s time on screen is in delivering fairly one-sided monologues, but then that’s where the film places her, the position of the one dying. Do we owe them deference? Of course we do. Do we resent having to defer to them? Maybe a little bit.

Martha (Swinton) was a war correspondent, and lived a somewhat free and self-determined life, and now has cervical cancer that isn’t responding to experimental treatments, and she would rather check out completely than continue chemotherapy.

Ingrid (Moore) is a successful author who used to be friends with Martha back in the day, and only finds out about her former friend’s predicament at a book signing. The book signing is for a book about accepting death, which Ingrid still seems terrified of.

When they reconnect Ingrid only knows how to hide her feelings through fussing and making platitudinous statements about being optimistic and wearing, I dunno, sweaters or something. Martha sees someone she can use for her own purposes, but otherwise they seem chummy enough.

There is a distance there, though. I don’t know if it’s just that they share a past, but not a present, nor do we see an example of Martha with her closer, current friends to know whether there is a difference or whether she’s like that with everyone: open but guarded, unfiltered, but too proud to be a burden.

I haven’t read the book this movie is based on, but it did remind me of a different book, one by Helen Garner called The Spare Room, about a middle-aged woman reconnecting with another middle-aged friend who has cancer, and having her stay over for a couple of weeks. I don’t think the point of that book was that it was way harder for the friend to cope with their irritation than it was for the woman with the cancer, but that’s how it came across in that instance.

It’s not that the friend in this instance is the one suffering: she has the doubt, the uncertainty and, absurdly enough, the legal peril to consider. Ingrid is the one who will still be here, come what may. Martha, either way, will be gone soon. She has her plan, with something procured off of the dark web, and her conviction that it be at a time of her choosing rather than fate deciding for her.

Only two things really connect these women, other than the eternal bonds of sisterhood which are either made of unbreakable metals or are of a material so flimsy a harsh word can smash them to vapour. One is that they are both almost insufferable art wankers, constantly quoting other art, artists, prose or poetry (which is perfectly appropriate in what we would have called back in the day an arthouse film), which is really just the author / screenwriter / director quoting other artists. For Martha that involves quoting a lot of James Joyce’s The Dead, which I would argue is almost like cheating. And then they watch a DVD version of the movie depicting the scene she’s quoted, which quotes Martha quoting Joyce.

For the cinematographer, this involves filming scenes where there’s a print or a painting, in this case a Edward Hopper painting, and then replicating scenes in the film where it looks like a Hopper painting. Everything is, despite or because of the themes of the film, overly set and art designed to within an inch of its life. One of the jumpers Swinton puts on at one point has to be seen to be believed.

The other is that they shared a lover, as in, when Martha was done with him way back in the day, he moved on to Ingrid for a while. They both agreed that he was very skilled and very enthusiastic, which was, you know, great for him and hopefully for them too.

It’s all well and good when they’re talking about someone from the past, but of course nothing is that simple. Ingrid is still friends with him, and he keeps popping up in the form of the great John Turturro, and keeps hassling Ingrid in a way that implies he wants to have sex with her again, the randy old goat. This character is nothing like the Turturro I generally expect in flicks these days (mostly based on his portrayal of the character Isaac on the brilliant Severance tv series), because he might be helpful to Ingrid and such, and charming, but there’s a coldness there, a ruthlessness borne from believing that climate change will be ending the world (for humans) very soon. If you think humanity is doomed, and soon, why would the death of a former lover trouble you?

Ingrid is the one who worries. She is staying with a friend and sort of looking after her, but not really, dithering around trying to maintain normality in circumstances that are anything but normal. She’s just meant to kind of be a default witness (in the next room), so that Martha isn’t alone, and doesn’t die alone. That just means that she’s a bit of a nervous wreck much of the time, and some of that anxiety is projected onto the audience.

The agreement is that when Martha is good and ready, she’ll have closed the door to her room that night, and so her friend will know in the morning that the deed was done. So when the wind through a window accidentally closes her door, it’s understandable that Ingrid loses her mind a bit.

Martha is somewhat apologetic, but undeterred. I have read that Swinton herself has been suffering from long covid since 2022, and you can sort of see that in her performance. She seems so bone-weary, so exhausted and wrung out by life, even as she looks like a living, younger David Bowie. She speaks of losing her memory, losing her ability to connect to things, losing her ability to feel or experience much of anything, and it seems quite sad. That seems almost worse than the cancer itself.

When what is fated to happen happens, well, aren’t we in for a surprise when Tilda shows up again, but playing Martha’s daughter Michelle, and somehow completely and utterly pulling that off convincingly. And she could not be more different, or more at a loss, that we would have suspected.

As presented this flick is about so much more than just death, or even death by one’s own hand, or whether people should have the right to given the circumstances, and it’s all presented exquisitely by a master of his art, with all of the overly melodramatic music you could ask for. The flick avoids melodrama, thankfully (unlike the soundtrack), but also doesn’t hit like you’d think. I am a cheap date and tear up and cry at the slightest provocation, but tears did not flow here, not for me, not a one.

Part of it might be that death presented like this isn’t a tragedy, doesn’t feel like a tremendous aching loss of someone we’ve come to love over the course of a movie. It doesn’t even feel bittersweet; It feels like a natural end, like the end of pain and suffering that we should all be entitled to regardless of and despite what any particular person’s invisible sky god says about things.

As such for me I’d say the pleasures of watching The Room Next Door came more from the intellectual level the flick works on rather than the emotional level you might otherwise assume you’d be made to engage with. I understand Martha’s regrets about her own life, and that of her daughter, but despite the fact that she comes across as a person filled with remorse I also enjoyed the sense of peace she seemed to have achieved as this character. There’s a Zen-like quality to her performance, especially later on, that feels earned.

This is not for everyone. But for those of us who have experienced the palliative care circus towards the end of a loved one’s life, there are familiar fears, familiar touchstones, and great performances, ideas and cinematography throughout to see, if not to enjoy.

8 times The Room Next Door is not a great ad for Airbnb out of 10

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“I don't want to be at home, or go back to someplace where I was happy in the past. We must never return to the places where we were truly happy because we ruin the good memories of the first time.” – not a problem - The Room Next Door