If you know nothing about The Room Next Door beyond its co-stars, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, you might understandably assume the film would be a heart-wrenching drama like We Need to Talk About Kevin and Magnolia or a brilliantly offbeat comedy like Problemista and The Big Lebowski. That the film is written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar isn’t really a clue one way or the other. After all, the celebrated Spanish filmmaker has run the gamut from tender melodramas (All About My Mother, Parallel Mothers) to outrageous comedies (Dark Habits, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) to sentimental Westerns (Strange Way of Life) and nerve-shredding thrillers (The Skin I Live In). Essentially, between the three of them, there’s so much range that anything is possible in The Room Next Door.
Some may be disappointed that rather than the theatrical symbolism of Almodóvar’s last collaboration with Swinton, the short film “The Human Voice,” or the bonkers broad comedy of the airplane-set musical I’m So Excited, the multifaceted filmmaker offers something subtler. But once you’ve found the wavelength of The Room Next Door, it’s undeniably beautiful, smartly amusing, and definitively humane.
What’s The Room Next Door about?
Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, The Room Next Door centers on two old friends who reconnect in New York City as one is releasing her latest book and the other is facing a terminal diagnosis. Novelist Ingrid (Moore) is quick to reconnect with war reporter Martha (Swinton) as soon as she hears the tragic news through a mutual friend. A visit in the hospital swiftly reignites a lively friendship, as the two share stories, memories, and regrets. Before long, Martha hatches a plan.
Death is inevitable, particularly hers. So she decides to go out on her own terms. Having secured a drug from the dark web, she proposes to Ingrid that they go to a beautiful rental house in a lush forest in upstate New York for one last trip. It’s a vacation where they can sunbathe, read, relax, and where Martha is determined to die. It’s important Ingrid be there, but not too close, just “in the next room.” Reluctantly, Ingrid agrees, and Martha’s death becomes more real with every moment, whether they’re watching an old movie or swapping notes on a once-shared lover (silver fox John Turturro). In this, Almodóvar and his stars perform a moving ballet of mortality, grief, and acceptance.
The Room Next Door is defiantly beautiful in the face of death.
While the subject matter risks falling into maudlin territory, Almodóvar balances the thematic darkness with visual splendor. As the sun sets on the skylines of New York City, the buildings glisten in lavender, punctuated with pink windows alive with light. The forests surrounding the upstate vacation home are almost unreal in their rich greens, yellows, and purples. The spaces where these women move about are striped with bold reds and deep teals. And the women themselves are bedecked in gorgeous shades of fuschia, neon yellow, mustard, and lime. Beyond being pretty, these elements serve as a visual reminder of the persistent beauty found even in the darkest days.
Almodóvar applies a painter’s eye in The Room Next Door, reflecting the emotional state of Ingrid and Martha through where they stand in the frame. In moments of brewing stress, his cinematographer Eduard Grau often positions Ingrid alone, far off the center of the frame, reflecting her unease in this painful scenario. By contrast, Martha thrives in the center of the frame, confidently resigned. Yet their moments of quiet understanding and affection are visually balanced, with the cinematographer putting them either together in the center or spaced just so that a scale wouldn’t topple.
In one of the film’s most visually striking moments, Almodóvar creates his version of Christina’s World, the famous Andrew Wyeth painting that presents a woman, seated in a grass field, looking off to a distant house. While the message (and politics) of that painting have been debated since its debut in 1948, here Almodóvar contextualizes the image as an eerie moment of death and fate, two things which even the most gorgeous, vividly dressed woman cannot escape. And in doing so, The Room Next Door quietly urges its audience to embrace the now, for it is all that’s certain beyond an end.
Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton are wondrous in The Room Next Door.
Compared to Almodóvar’s brassier offerings, The Room Next Door plays as subdued. But that’s a suitable reflection of Martha’s serenity in the face of death. Tears won’t help. Tantrums will only waste time. And so she, and through unintentional peer pressure, Ingrid, regards this final chapter of their shared story with a warm reflectiveness. Flashbacks pull us into a careless youth, made more romantic by remembering. Playing narrator to such scenes, Swinton has a slight swoon to her voice, as Moore’s tone takes on an encouraging curiousness.
Whatever the mood, be it jubilant, blissful, or wounded by loss, these two connect in tone and touch, masterfully establishing a friendship loyal and robust. Then, in a third act that leaps to an unpredictable chapter, Swinton and Moore’s dynamic shifts. And once more, they find a mesmerizing balance between two women looking from different sides of an experience. Incredibly, The Room Next Door gently lays us in their space of overlap, presenting not just a life and a death, but a friendship that defined both.
The Room Next Door was reviewed out of its North American Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The movie will next screen as part of the New York Film Festival, Oct. 4.
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