The Room Next Door: Swinton and Moore in Almodóvar’s Exploration of Death by Design
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
O Lord, when death comes, could it please come as gorgeously colour coordinated as it does in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door?
The Spanish director’s first English language feature, based on Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through?, approaches the subject of life’s ending with style. It stars Tilda Swinton as a terminally ill woman determined to die on her own terms of her own good taste, and Julianne Moore as her reluctant house companion.
With few of the melodramatic flourishes for which Almodóvar is renowned, The Room Next Door is a contemplative film that, after a bumpy introductory act, progresses to a cathartic meditation on friendship and the possibilities of finding moments of joy under a cloud of tragedy.
The film begins with Ingrid (Moore) at a New York book signing for her book about her fear of death. She is approached by a colleague from her journalism days. She mentions that a common friend Martha (Swinton) is in hospital treated for “the bad kind” of cancer.
Ingrid visits the hospital where Martha rests, looking pale but vivid in bright red pajamas. The two women were once writers for a New York publication known as Paper. Ingrid went on to become a successful author while Martha flourished a war correspondent.
In their first meeting at the hospital, Martha sounds hopeful. She’s undergoing an experimental treatment that may improve her chances of surviving stage 3 cervical cancer. On subsequent visits, Martha talks about her estranged daughter Michelle, who she had when she was a teenager.
The father, a Vietnam vet, had PTSD and had no interest in fatherhood, and died some years before in a fire. Michelle has always resented her mother, who she blames for keeping her from knowing her father.
There’s a lot of backstory unfolded here, with occasional digressive flashbacks. Outside the hospital, Ingrid discusses her plans for her next book, a fictional telling of the marriage of Bloomsbury Group figures, painter and photographer Dora Carrington and the gay writer Lytton Strachey.
Martha, in turn, discusses her own foray into unpublished fiction, an account of the romantic relationship between two Spanish Carmelite missionaries she met while covering the Iraq war.
While the stories reveal the women’s worldliness and refined taste, the dialogue feels less like conversation than chunks of prose read aloud. As a side note, Nunez’s novel may have been inspired by her friendship with Susan Sontag whose book, Illness as Metaphor, could be the direct source for Martha’s rants about the stigmatizing language people use to talk about cancer.
Our engagement picks up markedly after the half-hour mark, when Martha makes a request of Ingrid to accompany her on a trip to a luxurious rental cottage near Woodstock, New York where, at some point over the next month, she plans to take a suicide pill.
She explains that she does not want to be surrounded by the things she is attached to, but she wants to know there is someone in the next room when she goes. She frankly admits that Ingrid wasn’t her first choice, but other friends turned her down.
Once the two women are ensconced in their woody retreat, the film begins to take hold. The situation of two women in a cottage — one ailing, one in the attendant role — draws obvious parallels to one of art cinema’s pinnacle achievements: Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 psychodrama Persona, with Bibi Andersson as a young nurse caring for a famous actress (Liv Ullman) who has suddenly stopped speaking.
Almodóvar alludes to Bergman’s film in some of his frame compositions. With its sweeping orchestral score, carefully curated colour schemes and clothing, The Room Next Door has a dreamlike aura —though more in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk — and the relationship between the two women is warmly pragmatic.
They eat and watch movies, including a comedy with Buster Keaton dodging boulders on a hillside, and director John Huston’s adaptation of James Joyce’s story The Dead, the closing lines of which are a motif through the film.
There are rules to their living arrangement. Ingrid refuses to hear Martha talk about her death but when Martha’s bedroom door is closed, that will be the signal she has taken her pill and died.
The reward of the film is watching these two consummate performers playing off each other. Moore is characteristically empathetic and sincere. Swinton, by contrast, is enigmatic and controlling as they wrestle with their different agendas and find mutual consolation in their friendship.
In a secondary role is John Turturro as Damian, a former lover of both women, once a carefree bon vivant, now a professor and climate change doomsayer, spiralling into nihilism. When Ingrid sneaks out of the cottage to have dinner with him, she snaps back at his expressions of hopelessness in a world he sees careering toward its extinction, because her bond with Martha tells her that the anticipation of tragedy cannot nullify hope.
There’s nothing generic about The Room Next Door though there is some suspense in waiting for Martha’s fatal decision. In the tail end of the film, the narrative feints at a police procedural, with Alessandro Nivola in a single scene as a sanctimonious cop.
Finally, there’s a narrative twist at the end, not exactly a resurrection, but a flourish that’s pure Almodóvar.
The Room Next Door. Directed and written by Pedro Almodóvar. Starring Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, John Turturo and Allesandro Nivola. In theatres January 10.