Whereas in 1934 Paramount released Death Takes a Holiday, starring Frederic March and co-written by playwright Maxwell Anderson, 90 years later, smack dab in the holiday season Sony Pictures Classics has unleashed a movie about death in Los Angeles and New York. In Spanish director/co-writer Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door former combat correspondent Martha (Tilda Swinton) is stricken by stage-three cervical cancer and undergoing an experimental treatment. A longtime friend she hasn’t seen for years, Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is an author whose latest book tour has taken her back to Manhattan.
There, the onetime colleagues at the same magazine reconnect. You know how it is with old friends—soon Ingrid and Martha pick up where they left off and it’s almost like years hadn’t gone by without them seeing one another. When it becomes clear to Martha that the innovative immunotherapy care she’s receiving is unsuccessful, the shutterbug who’d covered war for The New York Times and was an eyewitness to death countless times decides to take matters into her own hands and stare the Grim Reaper right in the eye sockets.
To do so, Martha—who is estranged from her own daughter (the preternaturally talented Swinton also plays her main character’s own daughter in some scenes)—lobbies Ingrid to become part of her elaborate death with dignity plan, eventually persuading her to relocate for a month to a rented house near Woodstock. In Upstate New York Ingrid encounters Damian (John Turturro), a former lover and prominent climate crisis soothsayer who happens to have a nearby speaking engagement. Back in the day, Damian had also been a romantic partner of Martha’s. Will sparks fly again between Damian and Ingrid? Or will he bring Martha back to life with some sexual healing? Perhaps, if The Room Next Door was directed by a straight, Hollywood helmer, the movie, adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, might have moved in a different direction.
Be that as it may, Damian’s dire doom and gloom ruminations about global warming also express Almodóvar’s apparent preoccupation with death. Once the enfant terrible of Spanish cinema, with movies such as the eccentric eighties’ hits Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, at 75, Almodóvar seems as if he is confronting his own mortality with The Room Next Door’s meditation on the final curtain.
Known, like George Cukor before him, as “a women’s director,” who featured sensuous actresses such as Penelope Cruz in films like 2006’s Volver, The Room Next Door has lots of dialogue, especially between Ingrid and Martha, as they contemplate you-know-what. Some may find all the palavering to be stagey, others may consider it to be insightful. In this sense Room recalls Almodóvar’s 2002 Talk to Her, with a philosophical tone and elegiac edge. Swinton, who starred in Almodóvar’s 2020 short The Human Voice, about abandonment, delivers a deeply etched portrait as a human facing the end (as must we all), and wrestling to do so on her own terms.
The prolific, protean British thespian is an odds-on favorite for a Best Actress Academy Award nomination; in 2008, Swinton struck Oscar gold in the Best Supporting Actress category for Michael Clayton. Julianne Moore likewise turns in a stellar, finely delivered performance in Room that may earn her another Best Supporting Actress nom—she’s previously been nominated four times in that category and in 2015 won Best Actress for Alice. This may be among Turturro’s best roles in years, although he may not have enough screen time in The Room Next Door to get an Academy Award nod.
Swinton did receive a Golden Globe Best Actress nomination for Room, as has her fellow Brit, Kate Winslet, for portraying real-life war photographer Lee Miller in Lee. (Since 2018’s A Private War starring Rosamund Pike as the real-life Marie Colvin, there has been a mini-vogue of films featuring female combat photographers, including Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny as fictitious photojournalists in 2024’s action-packed Civil War.)
The 107-minute The Room Next Door, which is Almodóvar’s first English language feature, has a variety of other plot threads. There are flashbacks to a Vietnam War-related story; mother-daughter relationships are explored, as are the dark web and the issue of the law versus ethics (often the two are, at best, very distantly related, if at all). A blast from the past is a recurring theme with the reappearance of Ingrid, Damian, etc., in this film that is, at least in part, about how our pasts haunt our present-day lives, shaping how we’ve lived them.
This is an excellently acted drama about a very serious subject—death, and how we face it. I fear I don’t confront others’ demises directly and well, just recently losing my brother-in-law and a friend of 46 years, painter Martin Charlot; I don’t think I acquitted myself with valor. However, although cinematographer Eduard Grau suffuses many scenes with paint from a brightly colored cinematic palette, to be candid the Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa season seems like the least likely time of the year to open this movie about the final bow, such a downbeat topic. I realize that the Dec. 20 release in L.A. and N.Y. is likely so The Room Next Door, which won the Golden Lion at the Toronto International Film Festival, can be in Oscar contention, but still, this is the wrong time for a movie about you-know-what. However, it will open in select cities Jan. 10 and go nationwide Jan. 17. After the holidays have died the theme of mortality may be more welcome and there may be more room for Room, as Almodóvar’s latest thought-provoking work richly deserves.
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