Review: Pedro Almodóvar stares death in the face with the beautiful but clunky The Room Next Door | Canada Voices

The Room Next Door

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

Written by Pedro Almodóvar, based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez

Starring Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton and John Turturro

Classification N/A; 106 minutes

Opens in select theatres Jan. 10

Who among us has not imagined their own death? How our final hours might be spent, down to the location, the time of day, the last meal, the outfit. It must be a particularly tempting dark fantasy to stage-manage for a filmmaker, who by the nature of their profession is prone to controlling every last element of a frame, a character, a life. And Pedro Almodóvar has to be the guiltiest among them, the Spanish master’s entire filmography reading as a guide on how to design the many meticulous and quotidian details that add up to one’s existence.

This is at least the immediate impression left by The Room Next Door, a film that should fit neatly into the Almodóvar canon were it not for a too thin and unintentionally stilted script that betrays the fact that Almodóvar’s 23rd feature is also the first that he has ever shot in English (outside of the 2020 short Strange Way of Life).

Tracing the final days of cancer patient Martha (Tilda Swinton), a one-time war journalist who has asked her long-out-of-touch friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to help her carry out a plan of euthanasia, The Room Next Door splashes Almodóvar’s trademark sense of melodrama across a story that welcomes death with a warm, generous embrace.

When Ingrid and Martha first reconnect after decades spent apart – the two initially met while working at New York’s surprisingly still-going Paper Magazine – the latter is just on the tender precipice between false hope and acceptance regarding her prognosis. Once the disease is deemed terminal, though, Martha devises her own end-of-days plan in which few outsiders are willing to participate.

Martha certainly isn’t going to get help from her estranged daughter, who broke off contact years ago over her mother’s refusal to reveal the details of her birth father. And Martha’s closest friends balk, too, fearful of being criminally charged with abetting a suicide. This leaves Ingrid, who, as it happens, has just written a bestselling novel in which she explores her own crushing fear of death.

Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s acclaimed 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar hits upon a seemingly perfect work of source material to explore his favoured themes: the inescapable spectre of mortality, the frissons of friendship, the glory of a life lived on one’s own terms.

Even though Nunez’s prose is more subtle and deadpan and her story more open-ended than Almodóvar’s typical output – particularly the novel’s ending, which is reworked here in a definitive, and perhaps deflated, manner – that doesn’t stop the director from slathering the material in his beyond-heightened style, complete with vibrant colour schemes, magazine-spread-ready interior design, and a pounding score from regular collaborator Alberto Iglesias that underlines every emotion in a bright and juicy blood-orange hue.

Yet not even an iconic aesthete such as Almodóvar’s can run away from the fact that his first full-length English-language screenplay plays it all far too straight. Moore and Swinton –alongside brief supporting turns from John Turturro as Ingrid (and Martha’s) former lover, and Alessandro Nivola as a righteous cop – do their very best to take Almodóvar’s clunky, start-and-stop dialogue and turn it into something resembling actual human conversation. But ultimately, it all becomes too strained to take seriously.

Almodóvar has always been the sole author of his scripts, but if he was already breaking one precedent by working in English, then why not continue to break tradition and add a co-writer to the mix?

Not helping matters is the director’s decision toward the end of the film to place Swinton in a dual role. While Almodóvar has long played with narrative and thematic concepts of doubling (see Parallel Mothers, The Skin I Live In, All About My Mother), the particular way in which he reutilizes Swinton cannot help but undermine the drama that preceded it.

Almodóvar doesn’t quite crash his own funeral here. But he doesn’t leave much room for an elegant eulogy, either.