The Room Next Door | 2024
Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodóvar’s THE ROOM NEXT DOOR, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
On paper, the mixture of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in the first English language feature by Pedro Almodóvar sounds like a can't miss prospect. The basic ingredients are all there, bright colors (that red lipstick!), women in crisis, a sensually moody score by Alberto Iglesias, but The Room Next Door feels strangely cold and distant, a germ of an idea that never seems to fully get off the ground.
Swinton's Martha is a former war correspondent recently diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer. Unable to cope with the prospect of another round of debilitating radiation treatment, she orders a euthanasia pill off the dark web and plans to take her own life. Not wanting to die alone, she asks her old friend, Ingrid (Moore), to be there in the room next door when she does the deed. The two of them head off into the woods for a month-long retreat, where Martha plans to take the pill at a time known only to her, and over the course of that month, the two women grow closer together than ever before.
It isn't an uninteresting premise, however the film fails to do anything particularly interesting with it. In fact, Almodóvar seems somewhat lost in his new American milieu. His attempts to connect his themes of mortality to current events with late breaking discussions of climate change and the failure of neoliberalism to address the threat of fascism, feel half-baked. Swinton’s former career as a war correspondent feels similarly tacked on, a lifetime of facing death that doesn’t really inform her character in a particularly meaningful way. An expository monologue by John Turturro at the end feels like it comes out of nowhere, laying out what the film is saying about the tension between hope and fatalism in the face of tragedy, and then doesn't really do anything with it. But it's Alessandro Nivola, who shows up in the last few minutes of the movie in a throwaway role as fanatically religious cop on a moral crusade against euthanasia, that really tips Almodóvar's weak hand here. It reveals the Spanish filmmaker's lack of understanding of evangelical Christianity and American conservatism in general. Not only does it add little to the film, it rings completely false.
Why, then, does a film that tells us exactly what it's trying to say feel so lightweight? Almodóvar is at his best when blending elements of Douglas Sirk melodramas and classic film noir into something both pulpy and magical. The Room Next Door is none of those things, it's meandering and shallow; and despite a few lovely moments courtesy of its luminous leading ladies and cinematographer Eduard Grau (A Single Man, Passing), it never really connects in a satisfying way. After the one-two punch of Pain and Glory (2019) and Parallel Mothers(2021), this is a rare misfire from a typically reliable master.
