Colour frequently proves a highlight in the films of Pedro Almodóvar. But Tilda Swinton’s deglamed, makeup-free face offers one of the best shocks his frame has seen in some time. The actress, reuniting with Almodóvar after the short The Human Voice, gives a devastatingly satisfying performance in The Room Next Door. She plays Martha, a journalist with terminal cancer. After surviving the storms in some of the world’s worst conflict zones, Martha doesn’t feel up for battle. She’s ready to die. “Impatient” to die, she tells her friend, Ingrid (Julianne Moore).
As the camera frequently frames Swinton’s face in close-up, capturing the fine lines of age and Martha’s gaunt cheeks, she looks beleaguered, fatigued, but still radiantly alive. She’s had a good life and doesn’t see the point in defining her last chapter with prolonged agony. This film explores what it means to go out on your own terms, to exit the plane before it crashes, or bail from the car before it runs out of gas. “Cancer can’t get me if I get me first,” Martha says confidently.
Martha’s intuitive word choices are among the many literary highlights of The Room Next Door. The film is remarkably attuned to language as Almodóvar’s first English-language feature. (He previously made the English short Strange Way of Life, too.) The Spanish director adapts Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through and delivers one of his talkiest films outside his native tongue. This gift for gab often proves an under-valued trademark of his work, which fans often overlook in praise of his visual style. The guy literally won an Oscar for writing a movie called Talk to Her, but this play on women talking is one of Almodóvar’s better feats as a screenwriter.
It helps, too, he finds two note-perfect women to bring the script to life. Swinton inevitably gets the showier part—and a dual role, no less—as Martha and her daughter. Moore, meanwhile, often serves as the reaction to her scene partner. Ingrid re-enters Martha’s life when she learns that her estranged friend is dying. Visiting her in the hospital, Ingrid listens intently to Martha’s stories. Her friend accepts that it’s the end of her life. That recognition entails some unburdening. Martha’s making peace with her life, letting it all go without regrets. Nothing’s bottled up, even her disappointment that her daughter’s response to forgo treatment was, “It’s your choice.”
While Martha talks and talks in reflective monologues that Swinton delivers without a hint of sentimentality, Ingrid takes it all in. Moore’s subtle performance observes how Ingrid treats these sessions as equal parts research and therapy. When The Room Next Door begins, she’s promoting a book about her fear of death. Her approach to the end of one’s life is much different than Martha’s outlook.
So, when Martha makes a big ask of Ingrid, she doesn’t take it lightly. Martha wants Ingrid to accompany her on her final voyage: to rent a house where she’ll take a euthanasia pill. Martha doesn’t expect anything, just company. All Ingrid has to do is spend a month in the company of her biggest fear.
However, death becomes her almost as much as it does Martha. The friends languidly spend days and nights talking, watching movies, and musing about past loves. There’s a therapeutic power to these cathartic monologues, which do Martha much better than her chemotherapy does.
The strength of the second act, in which Martha and Ingrid rent the house, draws one into The Room Next Door after an intermittently alienating first act. Almodóvar juggles a few flashback scenes, which mirror the cadence of Nunez’s book, but delivers them somewhat awkwardly. In these early scenes, the picture cuts from Swinton’s monologuing and Moore’s subtle reactions to B-scenes of younger actors evoking the past. But when veterans like Swinton and Moore are this good and when they have such riveting chemistry, it’s a shame that Almodóvar doesn’t trust the audience to linger on their every word. Most Almodóvar fans would watch Swinton or Moore read the phone book, and they deliver here as if dialing 747-1111 offers the slice of life.
The Room Next Door, which won the Golden Lion at Venice and earned Swinton a Golden Globe nomination, marks something of a maturation in Almodóvar’s oeuvre. It’s not necessarily his best work, but it feels like both a continuation and a departure. The contemplative talkiness and the philosophical ramblings feel closer to the dramatic films of Woody Allen than they do the typical Almodóvar film. On the other hand, he’s been inching closer to this territory in recent years.
While adapting Alice Munro for Julieta and then confronting mortality and legacy in Pain & Glory, his films have turned inward. The outward nature of his earlier to mid-2000s’ films, buoyed by vibrant colours, flamboyant energy, and vivacious actresses vamping it up, has somewhat retired. That’s not a slight—just an observation. The Room Next Door is classic Almodóvar if one knows where to look. Just take a gander at the magazine-ready interiors and Swinton’s fashionable death ’fit. Even the lush red lipstick that affords her a shock of life while receiving the kiss of death evokes a mature filmmaker tailoring his craft to weightier means.
The maturity finds great synergy in Swinton and Moore, who give refreshingly introspective performances. They join their director at looking inward with one creating a character who finds peace with the satisfaction of a life fulfilled. The other creates a woman fuelled by a hunger to have all the answers before plunging into the unknown. All their talking inspires a soul-searching journey towards finding comfort with silence. It’s one of those movies that leaves you quietly stunned during the final credits.
