By Jake Coyle | Associated Press
Films that are directly about death are rare, but films that are about both death and sex are even rarer.
In Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door, the Spanish director's first English-language feature, Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, an acclaimed author who has just written a book about death. She is at a book signing in New York when she learns that an old friend, a war correspondent named Martha Hunt (Tilda Swinton), has been diagnosed with cancer.
Ingrid rushes to Martha in the hospital and the two friends, who haven't seen each other for years, quickly get to know each other again. Martha's cancer soon worsens and she asks Ingrid to help her put herself to sleep. “The cancer can’t get me if I get the cancer first,” she says.
Why don't you ask someone closer to her? Well, she has, says Martha, but for various reasons neither of them are willing. With an illegal pill she bought on what she calls the “Dark Web” and the slight conspiracy vibe that they're committing a crime together, they travel to a modernist house in upstate New York, where Martha plans to build her to put an end to life. She will be comforted, she believes, when Ingrid is right at the end of the hallway. Martha doesn't want any fuss, just a good time. “It’s like we’re on vacation,” she says.
“The Room Next Door,” whose title is based on Virginia Woolf's “A Room of One's Own,” is about finding dignity and contentment with death as a natural part of life, and perhaps also about the mystery of relationships that arise from it are the most important. The only thing Martha and Ingrid have in common is a former lover (played by John Turturro) who reappears in secret meetings with Ingrid. He's preoccupied with environmental catastrophe and the demise of the planet, but fondly remembers sleeping with Martha as “like having sex with a terrorist – it always felt like the last time.”
No one but Almodóvar can get away with lines like that, regardless of the language. A less feverish severity has crept into some of his fine late films (particularly “Pain and Glory,” but also “Parallel Mothers”), but they still have a passionate, melodramatic heart beating. Death is omnipresent in “A Room of One’s Own.” The film is in strong dialogue with other works such as “The Dead” by James Joyce. (One evening they watch John Huston's 1987 adaptation.) But it's not a particularly dark film, and you can tell from its bold, colorful designs and lush narrative that Almodóvar is as concerned with life as he is with to death.
“I still believe that sex is the best way to ward off impending thoughts of death,” Martha tells Ingrid.
Not all of it works, although, as is typical of Almodóvar's multi-layered films, every part of “The Room Next Door” seems conjured from a fully fleshed-out emotional terrain. (Here he adapts the 2020 American novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez.) There is an awkward and over-the-top flashback early in the film as Martha recalls her painful history with the father of her estranged daughter. Some dialogue can sound stilted.
But what undoubtedly works is Moore and Swinton together. While some of the more melodramatic or criminal flourishes feel forced, The Room Next Door's central relationship is consistently provocative. Swinton, in particular, is extraordinarily adept at finding Martha's unique balance: on the verge of death but still alive to so much – books, films, a friend's conversation. Death is approaching, so it's best to spend the rest in good company.
“The room next door”
3 out of 4 stars
Evaluation: PG-13 (for thematic content, strong language and some sexual references)
Duration: 110 minutes
