The Room Next Door
Pedro Almodóvar (2024)
The Human Voice (2020), a thirty-minute short starring Tilda Swinton, was Pedro Almodóvar’s first film with English dialogue. Swinton again has the main role in The Room Next Door, showing at the London Film Festival after its Golden Lion-winning world premiere in Venice a few weeks ago. This is Almodóvar’s first full-length film in English. As such, it’s bound to be a cinematic event but it’s not, alas, a happy event. This is not primarily due to its unhappy theme.
Swinton’s character, Martha, has terminal cervical cancer and wants to end her own life. Incurable illness is always in the headlines; euthanasia often is, too. (I happened to see the film on the day the Sunday Times published their interview with Chris Hoy. In a few weeks’ time, the House of Commons will debate and hold a free vote on assisted dying, for the first time since 2015.) In other words, The Room Next Door dramatises a subject that’s topical and raises important moral and legal issues. I think that’s one of its problems. As a private citizen, Almodóvar may well always have been seriously interested in politics and current affairs; as a writer-director of feature films, he has rarely, in the course of a career of more than forty years, let those interests get in the way of his artistry. Signs that that was changing were clearly there in Parallel Mothers (2021), in which he explored his country’s persisting reluctance to face up to the legacies of the Spanish Civil War. What might be termed urgent issues syndrome now takes over The Room Next Door, to its detriment.
Martha, a well-known war correspondent, made friends with Ingrid (Julianne Moore) decades ago when they worked on the same newspaper. They’ve long been out of touch but when Ingrid, now a successful author of non-fiction, learns Martha is terminally ill, they meet again and their friendship quickly revives. Martha confides in Ingrid that she has got hold of a ‘euthanasia pill’ through the dark web; she asks Ingrid to stay with her for the last days of her life, until she takes the tablet. Assisted dying isn’t even the only urgent issue taking centre stage. The main supporting character is Damian (John Turturro), ex-lover of both women but now a high-profile, profoundly pessimistic commentator on climate change, whose big moment in The Room Next Door comes when he speaks his mind on the subject to Ingrid, at some length. Almodóvar is rightly concerned about the planet’s future; as he reaches old age (he’s seventy-five now), he’s understandably concerned with the importance of dying with dignity. It’s a shame that, as a result, a lavishly gifted creator of film comedy is losing his sense of humour and that this latest film is unconvincing – indeed, sometimes laughable – as drama.
Almodóvar’s screenplay is based on a 2020 American novel, What Are You Going Through, by Sigrid Nunez. One of his less successful films of the 2010s was Julieta (2014), which he adapted from three of Alice Munro’s short stories. He originally planned to make his Munro adaptation his first English-language film but then had second thoughts. From the very first scene of The Room Next Door, you can hear why. Ingrid is in a bookstore, signing copies of her new book. A young woman buying the book says she’s heard that Ingrid used its prologue as a means of trying to come to terms with her fear of death. Ingrid confirms that and more: she starts telling the young woman how she can’t cope with the idea of a living creature turning into a dead one. This announcement – bluntly expository, awkwardly worded – lands heavily in the scene and worse is to follow.
The next person in the bookshop queue is Stella (Sarah Demeestere), whom Ingrid already knows and who asks if she’s heard that Martha is seriously ill in a Manhattan hospital. Ingrid doesn’t know but says she’ll visit Martha. Even though she hasn’t seen her for many years, she promptly does visit and the story is underway. The longer it went on, the more I thought The Room Next Door might have been better with Woody Allen in the Julianne Moore role, and not just because it’s set in New York City (and upstate New York). Ingrid’s main – just about her only – characteristic is that she’s scared of death. When Martha wants to discuss dying, Ingrid refuses to do so, baffling Martha, who points out that Ingrid has just written a book about it. The idea of someone scared stiff of mortality getting landed, as Ingrid is, with sustained proximity to impending death, has black-comedy potential. The Woody Allen persona would have improved even that book-signing sequence. If he’d made the remark about living creatures you’d have known he really meant ‘living creatures but especially me’.
There’s comedy potential too in the fact that Ingrid isn’t Martha’s first choice for staying with her, for being in the room next door when Martha ends her life. When Martha invites her to take on the role, Ingrid asks if she hasn’t approached Stella or other friends; the answer is yes but they’ve turned the offer down. It might have been grimly amusing if, in their tenser moments together (though these are few), Martha had voiced regret that she didn’t get the companion of her choice. The narrative could equally have been humanly affecting if Almodóvar had given some kind of grounding to the eleventh-hour friendship at the heart of the film. But you don’t get that either: the situation that drives the plot is merely a given.
Most of the comedy in The Room Next Door isn’t intended. Shortly after the two women arrive at the place near Woodstock where Martha chooses to end her days – a beautiful house with even more beautiful grounds and views from the upper windows – Ingrid hears an anguished cry from Martha’s room and hurries in to see what’s wrong. ‘You’re not going believe this …’ says exasperated Martha, who has left the euthanasia tablet in her Manhattan apartment. She’s right, you don’t believe it, though it’s less unbelievable than what comes next. They drive back to the apartment that Martha thought she had seen for the last time: now she can’t remember where she hid the tablet there. This triggers a traditional screen domestic search – frantically riffling through one drawer, pouring the contents of another onto the floor, and so on. It’s just about conceivable that Martha, in haste, forgot the tablet. It’s ridiculous that she left the apartment forgetting that she’d forgotten where the tablet was. (Ingrid eventually locates it in an envelope marked ‘Goodbye’.)
Perhaps Almodóvar means this as an example of the effects of ‘chemo brain’ to which Martha later refers although there’s precious little other evidence of that affecting her. Almodóvar, on the other hand, is repeatedly – sometimes very quickly – amnesiac. First, Ingrid has written a book prologue about fear of death, then she’s written a whole book. Once Martha has told Ingrid a few things about her life, it either slips Almodóvar’s mind or he decides virtually to ignore the fact that these women haven’t had contact for ages. Ingrid doesn’t get the chance to reciprocate with key facts about her life but she does tell Martha her next book will be a biography of Dora Carrington, majoring on the latter’s relationship with Lytton Strachey – or, as Ingrid describes him to Martha, ‘the writer Lytton Strachey’. Ingrid also informs Martha that Strachey was gay. Half a dozen lines later, it’s evident that Martha is as au fait as Ingrid with the Bloomsbury Group. By now, Almodóvar has forgotten that Ingrid felt she needed to supply Martha with the two best-known biographical facts about one of the Group’s best-known members.
There have been plenty of Almodóvar films where the narrative takes a confounding (but fascinating) turn and where queer elements pop up in unexpected places. The equivalents in The Room Next Door take the form of dismayingly clumsy flashbacks. Martha tells Ingrid of her teenage romance with a boy named Fred; they were happy together until Fred was called up for service in the Vietnam War. On the soundtrack, Tilda Swinton’s voice explains that when Fred came back he had changed. On the screen, young Martha (Esther McGregor) opens the door to Fred (Alex Høgh Andersen), who has a demented look in his eyes, and exclaims, ‘Fred! What’s wrong? You’ve changed!’ Fred replies that, although he has returned from Vietnam, ‘the war is still in my head’. (Almodóvar’s struggle to write decent English dialogue somehow seemed to vindicate my recurring suspicion that some foreign language films wouldn’t sound so good if the characters were speaking English.)
The older Martha reports that her teenage self and Fred had a child together, she raised the girl alone and Fred married someone else. She then describes how Fred and his wife (Victoria Luengo) were driving down a country road, when they saw a building on fire: Almodóvar shows all this happening. Fred can hear cries from the building, rushes in and burns to death. A fireman (Shane Woodward) informs his widow there was no one else inside. Martha tells Ingrid it was the memories of terrified screams he heard in Vietnam that Fred imagined he heard coming from the building. Since Martha didn’t herself witness this tragedy, it’s hard to know why she ‘remembers’ it as she does Fred’s homecoming. A bit later, Martha recalls one of her journalistic assignments, in war-torn Baghdad, where she and her cameraman (Juan Diego Botta) met with a Carmelite monk (a brief appearance from Raúl Arévalo), who was running a humanitarian relief centre. After this meeting, the cameraman revealed to Martha that he and the monk had once been lovers. So what?
Ingrid’s room in the Woodstock mansion turns out not to be the room next to door to Martha’s, which Ingrid finds too small. She asks if a room a floor below would be OK instead. Martha assures her that’s fine – that she’ll always keep her own bedroom door open so will be able to hear Ingrid’s breathing. (Either Martha has excellent hearing or Ingrid is a heavy breather.) Martha then says that, on the day she finds the bedroom door shut, Ingrid will know that the deed is done. As soon as Martha says this, you think: hang on, what if the door shuts accidentally? Sure enough, one night, Martha opens a window, a breeze blows the door shut and Ingrid next morning assumes Martha’s dead. It’s presumably her fear of death that prevents Ingrid’s entering the room just to make sure. Anyway, this enables Julianne Moore to react big-time to Martha’s death and, a screen minute later, to her resurrection. You don’t begrudge Moore this bit, given how thin her role is. You don’t blame her for accepting the role either – the prospect of working with Pedro Almodóvar had to be tempting – but he hasn’t served her well.
It’s a rather different matter with Tilda Swinton, whose pale, skinny presence Almodóvar exploits to considerable effect and whose ability to project sharp intelligence helps muffle the silliness of a lot of what she’s given to say. Swinton refutes The Room Next Door‘s emperor’s-new-clothes quality in another, more literal way, too. The film’s costumer, Bina Saigeler, has supplied her with a succession of stylish casual clothes in wonderfully vivid colours: few screen heroines at death’s door can have looked as good as Martha does. But the last part of Swinton’s performance is an anti-climax. When Martha dies, Ingrid contacts her estranged, now middle-aged daughter, Michelle; Swinton plays her also. The protagonist in the Alice Munro stories that Almodóvar turned into Julieta is the same woman at three different ages; when he was developing the material with a view to an English-language film, he envisaged Meryl Streep playing the character at all three ages. Tilda Swinton’s reappearance as Martha’s daughter somewhat echoes that idea (and she played a mother and daughter most successfully in Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter (2022)) but, when Ingrid and Michelle meet, Swinton is undone by a combination of severe make-up and hairdo, and banal writing. When Ingrid, in wonderment, tells Michelle that she looks so much like her mother, quite a few of us in the Royal Festival Hall audience laughed out loud.
The scenes that work best in The Room Next Door are ones that you sense Almodóvar thinks relatively unimportant in the film’s overall scheme – but where he shows more of his real self (or his old self). Worried she’ll get unfit while she waits for Martha to choose the moment, Ingrid goes to a gym, where she books a session with a hunky trainer, Jonah (Alvise Rigo). When he says she’s in pretty good nick for her age and urges her to keep fit to live longer, Ingrid gets upset; she tearfully explains she’s staying with a mortally ill friend. Jonah comforts her as best he can: he says he’d like to give Ingrid a hug but ‘we’re not allowed to hug clients any more in case …’ – a genuinely funny and affecting moment. Martha leaves a note stressing that she ended her life independently but a suspicious police officer gives Ingrid a tough interview. This taut exchange, very well played by Julianne Moore and Alessandro Nivola as the officer, is gripping. At least until the cop tells Ingrid he doesn’t approve of the taking of life either ‘as a police officer or as a human being or as a man of faith’. As soon as he utters those last words, you know he’s condemned himself out of his own mouth. Sure enough, a lawyer (Melina Matthews), hired by Damian to help Ingrid out if need be, arrives to deride the officer as a ‘religious fanatic’.
It’s not just Martha’s outfits that look good, of course. You may not feel you’re listening to an Almodóvar movie but you always know you’re watching one: the beautiful colouring of the images, lit by Edu Grau, and the fluent movement of the film are highly distinctive. Yet we’ve come to expect so much more from Almodóvar. This was my final visit to the 2024 London Film Festival; as I’d hoped, Steve McQueen’s Blitz, which I kicked off with, was the worst of the nine pictures that I saw. But this last one was the most disappointing. That stuff about the Bloomsbury Group is one of several references in The Room Next Door to the work of other literary and visual artists – references that smack of Almodóvar’s straining to boost his film’s own cultural credentials. Martha mentions the final paragraph of James Joyce’s The Dead. The films she and Ingrid watch in the Woodstock house include John Huston’s fine 1987 screen adaptation of Joyce’s short story (which was also Huston’s last film). At the very end, Tilda Swinton’s voice reprises the story’s closing lines: ‘he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling … upon all the living and the dead’. These tremendous words conclude a film disfigured by tin-eared ones.
20 October 2024