The downfall of The Room Next Door is in how Tilda Swinton speaks. It’s a problem that’s quick to reveal itself, and it’s obvious and overbearing once you hear it. As Martha, a former war zone reporter diagnosed with stage 3 cervical cancer, she is helped across her hospital room by her old friend, author Ingrid (Moore), and wheezes and grimaces – and then delivers her lines in a flawless fashion.
Of course, the idea of two of the great actresses of the last four decades working with Pedro Almodóvar, arguably the most important Spanish director of that era, in his first English-language film, seems appealing. And maybe 20 years ago this could have been more intriguing and fruitful. Instead, it’s hollow and stilted, a situation exacerbated by the mawkish and ill-fitting score by Almodóvar’s longtime composer Alberto Iglesias. There are some honest moments that only further reveal the shallow nature of the central story by comparison, like the brief burst of fire in a flashback scene between Martha’s photographer (Botto) and a Carmelite priest (Arévalo) in Baghdad. It’s 30 vivacious seconds in a film that’s meant to be obsessed with the questions of ending a life no longer well lived.
That’s the supposed central question. Rather than melting into a pile of agonized tumors, trailing IV bags behind her, Martha has procured a suicide pill from the Dark Web and asks Ingrid to sit in the room next door when she finally does the deed. The script, adapted by Almodóvar from Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through, sounds less like heavy conversations between the two and more as if the cast is rehearsing a staged reading of op-eds on assisted suicide and voluntarily euthanasia. When Martha explains her hatred of the loaded language around terminal illness, of “fighting” and “beating” cancer, it’s with mildly more passion and fury than if she was thumbing through the opinion pages of the Sunday papers. At least they both seem to acknowledge the weight of the issues, while John Turturro as their shared beau, Damian, rambles through weightless speeches about neoliberalism.
Heady matters like this would seem ideal for the operatic sensibilities of the director and the wildly differing strengths of his two leads – Swinton with her cerebral eloquence and internality, and Moore, whose body of work has been centered around a certain vivacity, of struggling to survive and thrive. That Ingrid has just published a book on death while being mortified by the concept seems like a perfect fit for the Safe star: yet maybe the film would be improved if their parts were swapped. Swinton’s ethereal ghostliness is too obvious, while Moore isn’t tested at all by Ingrid (if anything, it’s a grand disappointment after she handled similar end-of-life matters with more rage and insight in 2015 Alzheimer’s drama Still Alice, for which she won an Oscar). Worse, neither is convincing as a former hard-living writer. They’re just themselves.
Maybe the real issue is that this is less about the project, about the story, about its meaning, and more about three great artists getting to work together, then coasting on the fact that they are great artists. It’s a “very special episode” from some Oscar winners. That the script dares to quote the final lines of James Joyce’s “The Dead” in a desperate attempt to add a veneer of metaphysical pain is, quite frankly, infuriating horseshit. Such an important and tender subject as assisted suicide deserves more than this mawkish, soapish nonsense.
This article appears in January 10 • 2025.
