The Room Next Door

Thursday March 13 @ 7 pm

Preceded by: Loca

Drama
1 hr 47 min – Not Rated – Released 2024

Anchored by a pair of terrific performances swathed in vivid colors, Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language feature debut attests to his universal fluency in provocative filmmaking. After four-and-a-half decades of making rapturously acclaimed Spanish-language films, Pedro Almodóvar has written and directed his first ever feature-length film in English. And he could hardly have chosen two better actors to be in it. Adapted from a novel by Sigrid Nunez, The Room Next Door stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, both of whom are dazzling, even by their own brilliant standards.

Almodóvar continues to surprise and delight through his masterful use of color and composition. Since his earliest 16mm punk DIY roots, Almodóvar has shown a prodigious attention to color that few other directors can rival. In “The Room Next Door,” contrasting hues of green and red battle to draw our eyes to each respective star. Ingrid’s cool blue apartment assembled out of found objects is a world away from Martha’s slick, green-tinged apartment with a balcony garden. Almodóvar seems to take Moore’s bright red lipstick and striking hair color as a challenge to match her with the set design and outfits, but there’s not a bad choice on screen at any moment. After all these years, it’s still dazzling to watch what Almodóvar does with his canvas.

Their characters are Ingrid (Moore) and Martha (Swinton), two old friends who were magazine journalists in New York in the 1980s. Ingrid has gone on to be an author, her latest novel being about her fear of death, while Martha has had a long career as a daredevil war reporter. They lost touch a few years earlier, but when Ingrid hears that Martha is being treated for cervical cancer in a Manhattan hospital, she rushes to her bedside, and they are soon as close as ever. They become so close, in fact, that the alarmingly pale and skeletal Martha asks Ingrid to do her a monumental favour. She has found a euthanasia pill on the dark web, but she doesn’t want to be alone when she takes it. She wants Ingrid to be in the room next door.

The Room Next Door, as driven by the scalding humanity of Swinton’s performance, lifts you up and delivers a catharsis. The movie is all about death, yet in the unblinking honesty with which it confronts that subject, it’s powerfully on the side of life. Almodóvar, now aged 74, has clearly been thinking a lot about mortality. The Room Next Door isn’t a weighty philosophical work – as mature as it is, it still has glimmers of cheeky humour and campy melodrama. But it develops into a sweetly heartfelt reflection on ageing, dying, and whether-or-not it’s healthy to find joy in the most desperate of circumstances. There aren’t too many films like that in any language.