‘The Room Next Door’: Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton Plan a Suicide

Following last year’s underwhelming short Strange Way of Life, Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar makes his second English-language effort with The Room Next Door. Unfortunately, it appears as if the Spanish auteur wasn’t precisely sure what movie he wanted to make, and settled on a story (based on Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through) that’s not only awash in doubling, reflections, and bifurcations, but is inherently torn between its melodramatic and thriller instincts. Its formal lyricism offset by a script that’s intolerably clunky, it’s an affected portrait of euthanasia and friendship that gets lost in translation.

Winner of the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival, and screening at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival ahead of its Dec. 20 theatrical release, The Room Next Door begins with Ingrid (Julianne Moore), an author who helpfully explains to a fan at a New York City book signing that she’s afraid of death. No sooner has she made this confession than an acquaintance named Stella (Sarah Demeestere) materializes and informs her that their friend Martha (Tilda Swinton) is in a nearby hospital.

This stuns Ingrid, who promptly visits Ingrid, whose face looks thin but whose hair—blonde on top and shaved on the sides—is still perfectly coiffed. Ingrid relates that she has stage three cancer and that, when she first received the diagnosis, she was “ready” for the end. Nonetheless, given that her trial-drug treatment is working, the grave seems to be a ways off, thereby allowing the two to reconnect after decades.

Ingrid is a war photographer and has a daughter named Michelle from whom she’s been estranged since the girl’s childhood. This is due to Ingrid’s lack of maternal instincts as well as her reluctance to tell Michelle about her father. In a flashback that epitomizes the stilted quality of Almodóvar’s script, this paternal figure drives down a rural southern road in a red pickup truck with his new wife, at which point both spot a burning building.

“Something’s on fire,” she says. “There’s a house on fire,” he responds. Upon reaching the domicile, which is surrounded by nothing but miles and miles of barren land, the man—hearing screams that are the manifestation of his post-Vietnam PTSD—races into the house. Firemen arrive, yet he perishes, and his spouse weeps.

Aside from this and a few additional yesteryear scenes—including an Iraq-set snippet in which Swinton and her photographer meet, and then candidly discuss, a contact (Paolo Luka Noé) who’s also the guy’s former paramour—The Room Next Door is a two-hander in which Ingrid and Martha spend time in each other’s company.

The two reminisce about their shared past, including the fact that they both once dated the same man, Damian (John Turturro). “He was a passionate and enthusiastic lover, and I hope he was for you too,” states Ingrid in her typically forthright fashion. “I had no complaints,” chuckles Martha. Such is Almodóvar’s mannered dialogue, whose unnaturalness is so stark that it comes across as a deliberate device.

Martha and Ingrid’s dynamic is complicated by news that the former’s meds aren’t going to save her. Thus, she decides to kill herself. Ingrid is upset by this decision, and even more stunned when Martha asks her to help with this illegal mission. Despite her reservations, she agrees, and accompanies Martha to a house that she’s rented two hours north of the city in Woodstock.

There, the two get comfortable in their modernist new home, whose walls and outdoor chairs—the latter seemingly inspired by the Edward Hopper painting hanging inside—are primary-color coded. Red is particularly omnipresent, be it on Ingrid’s clothes, Martha’s giant sweater, or the door to the dying woman’s bedroom that she decides to use as an indicator about her condition: open means she’s still with the living, and closed means she’s chosen to move on.

Occasional chuckles are elicited by The Room Next Door, as when Martha confesses that she’s procured a “euthanasia pill” from the “dark web.” The thing is, the material is so wooden that it’s not always clear that Almodóvar is in on the joke. Once ensconced in their remote environs, Ingrid starts going to a local gym where she works out with a trainer whom she instantly treats as a close confidant about her fears and hang-ups regarding death.

Their sit-down is borderline ridiculous, and while its artifice is at least somewhat calculated, that doesn’t make it any less compelling. It stands in sharp contrast to a series of images (some recurring) that conjure a mood of wistful, ghostly melancholy, whether it’s a shot of the duo through a window that’s reflecting the surrounding trees, or the repeated sight of Ingrid gazing upward from a staircase to check on the status of Martha’s door.

Almodóvar’s graceful stewardship is at constant odds with his ham-fisted words and, consequently, the performances of his stars, who can’t overcome one flat line after another. Funniest of all, in a bad way, is a Damian eco-rant—spurred by his admission that he objected to his son having a third child—about the destruction of Mother Earth due to “neo-liberalism” and “the far-right.” This leadenly situates Ingrid and Martha’s predicament in the context of the world’s supposedly impending death. “There are lots of ways to live inside a tragedy,” states Martha, helpfully spelling out the film’s chief theme.

Throughout The Room Next Door, Ingrid and Damian discuss how she should behave in the aftermath of Martha’s suicide, since she’ll inevitably become a murder suspect. These hints about a Hitchcockian The Wrong Man scenario suggest that Almodóvar really wants to dive into genre waters. Sure enough, once Ingrid shuffles off her mortal coil, Martha winds up in the crosshairs of a cop (Alessandro Nivola) who asks her questions like an AI robot attempting to imitate a Law & Order detective.

Regrettably, despite Alberto Iglesias’ beautiful Bernard Herrmann-esque string score, this thread is resolved as if it were an afterthought, and a climactic bit of spectral doppelganger business (and some references to James Joyce’s The Dead) boldly underlines the film’s concerns.

The Room Next Door invariably resembles a “late period” work by an artist grappling with questions of mortality, impermanence, and legacy, and there are scattered moments when Almodóvar flirts with profundity. For the most part, however, it’s an inelegant affair that lacks the vivacity, complexity, and heart of his finest output.