Pedro Almodóvar translated with great artistic skill of his auteur cinema from Spain to Hollywood with the full-length ‘The Room Next Door’ (2024), in which he kept his style while paying homage to Golden Age Hollywood movies and conveying a challenging message about the freedom to choose how to end one’s life or to say it, the controversial subject of euthanasia. In recent years, Almodóvar directed the English language short movies ‘The Human Voice’ (2020) and ‘Strange Way of Life’ (2023).
Previous Almodóvar’s collaborator Tilda Swinton plays Martha, a war correspondent dying of cervical cancer who, after extenuating treatments, decides to terminate her life by her means and wants Ingrid, played by Julianne Moore, a writer and a friend from the past with whom she lost contact for years, to be her companion in her decisive moment and to be in the room on the next door in the luxurious house Martha rents to live her last days in a small town.
Swinton’s voice pitch, expressions, gestures, and acting convey a woman who has lived for decades under stress in family and work life and is coming to terms with her final chapter. Swinton owns an ethereal presence and, in some moments, resembles a personification of death, which is a fact of life and not a stereotyped battle of “good versus evil,” as Martha exposes in brilliant dialogue that debunks condescending notions about those enduring life-ending diseases and conditions.
Like Swinton, Moore is a world-class talent who expresses the responsibility required from her act. The performance is infused with melancholy that seeps through her attempts to act “normal” in an unusual situation. Moore modulates her voice as someone in a dark corner but trying to avoid others’ knowledge.
It is a picture of emotional depth as Almodóvar is dealing with ageing. Nevertheless, ‘The Room Next Door’ has light and tender moments, which are the right choice to avoid the traps of doom and gloom and generate false pity towards the ordeal faced by both characters.
This lightness is also seen in some moments when the physical humour with innuendo comes, as when the friends talk about their shared lover Damian (John Turturro), in the scene in which Ingrid is signing books for many women readers, many lesbians, and when the writer goes to the gym to alleviate the tension from the house and the exercise choreography with the trainer Jonah (Alvise Rigo) has a veneer of sexual tension. During the session, Ingrid breaks down and talks about her ordeal with a stranger, showing how physical proximity creates bonds.
Bridging heavy subjects to a broader audience
‘The Room Next Door’ is also part of the zeitgeist as it touches on climate change and human rights violations mainly through the speech of the activist Damian, who has a valid discourse. However, Turturro embodies a sense of self-righteousness, which is counterbalanced by the light air brought by Ingrid or the looming sense of personal closeness felt by Martha.
Another dark presence is in the film; the rise of the far right and its zealots emerges in the form of the unnamed policeman, played by Alessandro Nivola, a stark reminder of the political moment and how such forces can prey on personal decisions and body autonomy to preserve the status quo. A third prominent masculine presence is brought by actor Alex Høgh Andersen playing Martha’s young years boyfriend who has PTSD after serving in the Vietnam War.
These oppressive or absent emotions are furthered by the employing of architecture to represent the emptiness and solitude of modern life, which are counterbalanced by the use of colours. The latter is a characteristic of Almodóvar’s oeuvre, and his distinctive red appears in important moments, sometimes even dialoguing with Moore’s trademark red hair and bringing lightness to the euthanasia theme alongside the acting by the protagonists.
Being a film by the famed director, although Ingrid and Martha are not identified as gay, queerness permeates it as represented in some parallel stories. Ingrid is writing a book on the beautiful and unique yet tragic relationship between painter Dora Carrington and writer and gay man Lytton Strachey during the dawn of the 20th Century. Martha shared a similar tie with a war correspondent colleague who was in a romance with a Carmelite missionary, a member of the Catholic Church. Martha wrote the story of both men but decided not to publish it.
The movie is based on Ingrid Nunez’s book What Are You Going Through (2020), and it already touches on heavy subjects that mainstream Hollywood avoids, such as euthanasia, far-right ascension, and environmental rights. Almodóvar brought sister love between women and more by mentioning queer relationships from past figures or other characters while focusing on Martha and Ingrid’s friendship without overloading the narrative, which already has complex themes that might push regular audiences away.
In a way, ‘The Room Next Door,’ with its subtleness, might be able to open doors for future major studio dramas portraying layered lesbian relationships while also touching on heavy subjects like euthanasia, considering the state society finds itself in.
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