The Plot: Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is a novelist whose life has been just fine up to now. She becomes aware that her old friend Martha (Tilda Swinton) is in hospital. Martha was a war photographer but is now fighting a different kind of war against her own body, which is now unfortunately riddled with cancer. They both worked together on the same magazine but haven’t been in contact for years. As they get re-acquainted with each other and having shared the same lover in Damian (John Turturro) at different points in their lives, Martha comes to Ingrid with an unusual request that will come to define their friendship…
The Verdict: Having turned 75 recently, Pedro Almodóvar shows no signs of slowing down or signalling that he wants to hang up his director’s megaphone. Amen to that, as we need honest, urgent and distinctive voices like his in international cinema. The great Spanish director has primarily worked at home in his native language, with each film saying something about the state of modern relationships. Things are changing though and more recently he experimented with some English-language short films featuring Tilda Swinton and Ethan Hawke. It was perhaps inevitable then that he would eventually make a full-length film in English and here it is in the refined form of The Room Next Door. At its core, it’s an admittedly sombre story of friendship between two women under trying circumstances and also a reflection on mortality and the limits of the human experience. When a director reaches that fine age, his thoughts might turn towards such mortal things. This being Almodóvar though it’s done with style, suspense and, surprisingly, gentle humour.
Almodóvar has always been a particularly good writer and director of women. He understands them and their anxieties, hopes and needs so well, but it goes deeper than skin deep with him. His script with Sigrid Nunez is a thing of delicate beauty. It balances out a story of rediscovered friendship between two women that encounter each other after years apart, bonds them together under difficult circumstances and then separates them. All of this happens while holding those thoughts and feelings lingering in the air for the audience to take home afterwards. The challenge here is to deal with the sensitive topic of end-of-life and facing the inevitable head-on rather than shrink and cower from it. Martha has accepted this and is rather matter-of-fact about her terminal diagnosis, keen to get it over with before things get progressively worse. On the other hand, Ingrid is scared of death and doesn’t want to watch Martha waste away. And yet, she can’t ignore it.
If this sounds like rather grim viewing, then it’s not really. Almodóvar is such a careful director that he takes a very mature and considered approach towards the story. He quickly dismisses any gooey sentimentality but keeps the honest emotional undercurrent bubbling away so that it resonates when the time comes. This is a far more sophisticated approach towards dealing with death than, say, the average tearjerker you might find on a streaming service. Even when dealing with a darker theme like this, Almodóvar injects moments of suspense involving police questioning, flashbacks that are loaded with meaning for the present and some welcome dashes of humour courtesy of the ever-reliable John Turturro. It would have been easy to depict his character Damian as just an aging lothario, but Almodóvar gives him a decent enough backstory so that he doesn’t dominate the female-themed story but instead compliments it.
The switch to English has had no change in Almodóvar’s way of directing actors. He elicits genuinely affecting performances from two of the best in the business with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. Their performances are low-key but still high-powered, hitting the emotionally raw beats required but also ringing true one scene after another. Though, he does skirt with danger at the end with a casting choice but it could also be regarded as him being playful about parental relationships. James Joyce’s The Dead features prominently in the story, along with John Huston’s memorable film adaptation. If this film is a meditation about life and death it’s also about the art that comes in between, that makes those themes more bearable. The Room Next Door is another thought-provoking but no less impressive piece of vital filmmaking from Almodóvar. It touches the heart, the mind and the soul all at once – that’s not something many films can do these days.
Rating: 4 / 5
Review by Gareth O’Connor
In short: Vital filmmaking
Directed by Pedro Almodovar.
Starring Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola.