The Room Next Door

Pedro Almodóvar's latest woman-centered melodrama stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton as old friends facing death; despite stellar performances it's curiously flat.

In the usual year-end rush to watch as many movies as possible in preparation for critic group awards, I was curious as to why the new Pedro Almodóvar film was very little discussed. A critics’ darling and perpetual awards contender for decades, his pictures seem destined to always be in the thick of discussion.

Now that I’ve seen “The Room Next Door,” I can understand it being overlooked.

Like the bulk of his films, it’s a woman-centered melodrama focusing on their past trauma and how it informs their actions and personalities today. It stars two Oscar-winning actresses, Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, in bravura turns that really burrow inside their characters’ thoughts and fears.

It’s about confronting death — specifically, that one of them, Martha (Swinton) is facing terminal cervical cancer and the other, Ingrid (Moore), is enlisted to be her primary companion in the last steps of her life’s journey. Specifically, Ingrid is recruited to be with Martha when she commits suicide to avoid the painful last stages of her illness.

Ingrid is not expected to assist in the euthanasia, just be with her in the same house so she doesn’t feel alone — hence the title.

Adapted by Almodóvar from a novel by Sigrid Nunez, the screenplay employs a lot of stilted language and moments that don’t exactly ring authentic. Such as one character says to another, “You're one of the only people who knows how to suffer without making other people feel guilty about it.”

There’s always a certain level of conscious artifice in the Spainaird’s films, using the conventions of the genre and leveraging the audience’s expectations. We’re very much aware of the act of storytelling.

I just found the movie curiously flat. We don’t particularly empathize with either woman; rather we stand outside their little dance and observe them from a distance. There are no surprises: Martha states what she’s going to do, how she’s doing to do it, why she wants Ingrid by her side, and then everything proceeds as described.

Magazine journalists turned authors, the two women actually aren’t particularly close as the story opens. They lost track of each other, as people do, and haven’t even spoken in a number of years. Ingrid has just released her latest book, a success, and hears from a mutual acquaintance that Martha is seriously ill.

She pops into a hospital for what she thinks is going to be a quick in-and-out, perhaps followed up by a polite check-in or two. But Martha is utterly alone, having never married and long estranged from her daughter, Michelle (also played by Swinton). So Ingrid finds herself roped into being Martha’s primary support system.

A war correspondent, Martha is cognizant of the fact that she was not a very good mother, absent both physically and emotionally. Through flashbacks (with Esther McGregor as young Martha) we probe the source of Michelle’s discontent: Martha’s silence on the identity of her father. Alex Høgh Andersen plays Fred, Martha’s doomed boyfriend, and he makes a big impression in a few minutes of screen time.

The story eventually decamps to upstate New York, where Martha has rented a luxe modernistic home in the middle of the woods as her point of departure. She doesn’t want to have anything familiar around to entangle her emotions, she says. The arrangement she has with Ingrid is that she will keep her bedroom door open, and Ingrid will know the final act has been carried out (via a pill obtained on the “dark web”) when the door is closed.

John Turturro pops up for a few meaty scenes as Damian, another author — of the environmentalist doom-and-gloom variety — who was at different times a lover of both Martha and Ingrid. He reconnoiters with Ingrid about Martha’s plans, and offers advice about how to handle the inevitable police inquiry. He also makes plain his desire to restart their affair, something about which Ingrid is either entirely dense or colossally indifferent.

The movie isn’t particularly interested in the rightness or wrongness of euthanasia; there are no deep philosophical arguments or rumination. It’s simply presented as Marth’s choice, and Ingrid is subtly coerced into assisting. Despite their rediscovered friendship, there is a slight undercurrent of resentment as a result.

“People should see this is my way of fighting. Cancer can't get me if I get me first,” Martha says.

The film returns several times to the last lines of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” and I suppose it’s the sort of stuff literate New Yorkers would tend to spout. I find Joyce to be the singular most overrated writer ever, so his baubles — beautifully ornamented and utterly hollow if examined slightly — didn’t help my wavering enthusiasm for the movie.

“The Room Next Door” is well-made and acted, and we respect the craftsmanship of Almodóvar and his stellar leading ladies. But it manages to take a heartbreaking premise and turn it into something like a mix of crime procedural and soap opera. It’s a movie about death that struggles to seem very alive.