The ghosts of Pedro Almodóvar’s remarkable oeuvre populate his latest release, the eye-popping and emotional The Room Next Door—an interpretation of Sigrid Nunez’s much-loved novel What Are You Going Through—which just bowed at the Venice Film Festival. It contains two friends reuniting after years apart, à la Strange Way of Life; musings about babies being swapped at birth, as in Parallel Mothers; an exploration of loneliness, as in The Human Voice; a very Pain and Glory-esque examination of mortality; a heartbreaking account of mother-daughter estrangement, as in Julieta; the occasional spookiness of Volver; and the incandescently beautiful aesthetic of all of his other work to date. And yet, it also stands apart from the rest, telling a strikingly different—if still quintessentially Almodóvarian—tale of female friendship, death, and the murkiness of morality.
Taking center stage are Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton. The former is Ingrid, a celebrated novelist obsessed with death, who runs into an acquaintance at a book signing and learns that Martha, an old friend whom she has now lost touch with, is desperately sick. She visits her in the hospital and finds the ailing shell of the woman she used to party with in 1980s New York, when they were both at the beginning of their careers. But Swinton’s ethereal fragility in the part also belies a certain strength—we learn that Martha was a war correspondent; that she’s still haunted by everything she’s seen; and that she’s eager to take control of her current predicament: a late-stage cervical cancer that’ll almost certainly kill her.
Martha speaks to Ingrid about her regrets: namely, that she wasn’t able to repair her relationship with her estranged daughter, Michelle, who never forgave her for having to grow up without a father. Martha explains that she was just a teenager when she became pregnant, and that he was a Vietnam veteran scarred by the war who wanted to move elsewhere and start a new life. He married another woman, but died after running into a burning house, determined to save those he could hear crying for help inside. In the end, his body alone was retrieved—the screams were in his mind.
It’s a moving story, but the choice to tell it through a soap opera-style flashback feels unintentionally campy, and there’s a similar hokeyness to some of Ingrid and Martha’s early dialogue—lines are repeated flatly for emphasis and metaphors over-explained to the point of frustration. In Almodóvar’s native Spanish, this may have felt poetic, but here, in the auteur’s first English-language feature, it’s a tad heavy-handed.
But then, the film moves into its next act and receives a jolt of life: with their friendship rekindled and Martha’s health rapidly worsening, she comes up with a plan. She has bought a euthanasia pill from the dark web, she tells Ingrid, so that she, and not her illness, can decide when she passes. She wants to find a house upstate and end her life in peace—but she wants Ingrid to come with her, and to be in the room next door when it happens. She can’t face going alone.
Ingrid protests, but eventually relents—she understands her duty to her friend, but she’s also aware of the stakes, which include potential criminal charges if the police become aware of her prior knowledge of Martha’s intentions. They travel up, but then immediately have to return to New York when Martha misplaces the pill—in a heart-pumping sequence they turn her apartment upside down in search of it. (To order another illegally, she says, would be far too difficult.) When Ingrid locates it, in an envelope scrawled with the word “Goodbye,” you wonder if she’ll hand it over—but she does.
Over the next few days, back in their new country home, the pair lay out their ground rules: Martha insists that Ingrid should try to enjoy herself (though not write about their experience, lest the police find it—though, naturally, she does), and wait until she’s ready. Then, Ingrid will find Martha’s cherry-red bedroom door closed, and that’ll be the confirmation that she’s gone.
There’s a kind of Hitchcockian dread in this portion of the story, especially the shots of Ingrid climbing up the stairs to check the position of the door again and again—but also a welcome dose of morbid humor. Martha speaks of wanting to have sex with a mutual friend, Damien (Severance’s John Turturro), again—a shared lover from their past, with whom Ingrid is still in touch. Ingrid also goes to the gym, and is overcome to find herself breathless and haggard, suddenly concerned about her own mortality, too. In one of my favorite sequences, Ingrid sees the door is closed and promptly vomits and cries, but then a pale and ghostly Martha, dressed in white, comes downstairs, saying she’d opened a window and the breeze had blown it shut. Ingrid is furious.
However, that fateful day does eventually arrive, of course, and it unleashes a whole host of problems—the police begin to investigate, just as Michelle (played, hilariously, by an aged-down Swinton) arrives to hear about her mother’s final days.
From this point onwards, the narrative wraps up far too quickly, inexplicably leaving a number of trailing plot threads. There’s also a scene between Ingrid and Damien in which he connects their recent contemplations on mortality with the climate crisis, as well as the far-right who continue to deny its existence. While well intentioned, it comes a little out of the blue, and feels slightly too didactic.
Ultimately, what won me over, though, was not simply the irresistible pleasures of all of Almodóvar’s work—the swoon-worthy production design, the costuming, the incredible eye for r, the exacting cinematography—but the natural chemistry and warmth between Moore and Swinton, as they play two friends who are preparing for the unthinkable. The film asks: what might you do for your own friends? And when one is dying, what course of action is kind? What is cruel? And who gets to decide? The Room Next Door feels unfinished, certainly, but it’s also a wonderfully delicate and profoundly touching piece of filmmaking.
