How much would you be willing to show up for an old estranged friend? In The Room Next Door, Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton) reconnect after several years out of contact and embark on a brief but transformative journey to the very end — figuratively and literally.
Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar ventured into writing and directing in English with the shorts The Human Voice (2020) and Strange Way of Life (2023), and his debut English language feature-length film, The Room Next Door, contains all the auteur's signature bells and whistles: bold, poppy colours and set design, complex female characters engaging in lengthy conversations, and melodrama galore.
Ingrid and Martha are two writers living in New York City who met as colleagues at a magazine where they worked for years. After they drifted apart, Ingrid became a successful autofiction author and Martha became a war reporter. When Ingrid is made aware of Martha's terminal cancer, she visits her in the hospital and rekindles their bond. But when Martha decides she wants to take one last vacation to before choosing euthanasia and ending life on her own terms, she asks a supportive yet hesitant Ingrid to join her, to be her person "in the room next door" when the time comes. Some may be reminded of Pain and Glory, Almodóvar's 2019 film about a filmmaker whose chronic pain prevents him from working on new projects.
In simple words, The Room Next Door is a life-affirming story about death. Almodóvar bears the dark underbelly of human existence and suffering and lights it up with a love story and the contemplation of what it means to make peace with the end. It's visually eye-catching, with tender moments of heart and a central friendship that audiences will find themselves digging into and using to reflect upon their own friendships of the past and present. For a story about writers, however, its dialogue is stilted and on-the-nose at best, and distractingly unnatural at worst.
Based on the English novel What Are You Going Through by American author Sigrid Nunez, it makes sense that Almodóvar's screenplay would, too, be in English. But where his verboseness serves as a strength in his Spanish films, here it's contrived and awkward. Characters state exactly how they are feeling and what they are thinking, speaking with very little room for interpretation or subtlety, especially when referencing literature. James Joyce's The Dead gets brought up continuously, to the point that it feels like Ingrid and Martha are merely exchanging lines from the text back and forth to each other instead of in any way that feels impactful to the narrative.
Some may ask themselves, "Is it camp? Is it intentional?" on and off throughout the film. If it is, everything else surrounding the dialogue — save for perhaps Tilda Swinton's lemon yellow suit, the various close-ups of vibrant red lipstick, and the unconventionally colourful hospital rooms captured by Edu Grau's cinematography — doesn't feel suited enough to fit into a campy mould to feel fully realized, even if Almodóvar keeps a dash of melodrama to the less heavy scenes.
In spite of the dialogue, Moore and Swinton both deliver compelling performances. They have a genuine sweetness between them that feels like watching two people who have known each other for decades, no doubt thanks to their natural charisma as actors. They are the heart and soul of the film, with one or both of them on screen nearly at all times.
If you have lived through cancer, or known or lost someone who has, The Room Next Door and its two leading women will resonate. How Ingrid sets aside her doubts about Martha's decision to take care of her, and how Martha grows frustrated and defeated by her inability to enjoy life's pleasures like reading and writing while still finding joy and catharsis in her choice is extremely meaningful, even if the film only occasionally reaches the emotional heights it aims for.
In one scene with Ingrid and Damian (John Turturro) — a man she and Martha both previously dated, and with whom Ingrid is still in touch — Damian goes on a disjointed tirade about doomerism and climate change. The dialogue is shoehorned, preachy and dropped into the story at random, but through it comes an epiphany from the death-fearing Ingrid: "There are lots of ways to live inside a tragedy," she says in response to the topic at hand and the imminent end of Martha's life. "Of course it's painful, but I can take it."
The Room Next Door's dialogue has a cloudy quality and is mismatched tonally, which makes it difficult to connect with these characters outside of the obvious, meant-to-make-you-cry moments. Still, it gives the audience food for thought on the multifaceted ways to live inside a tragedy — the scary and ugly, but also the beautiful the celebratory, all coexisting as one.