By M. Faust

Do you ever wonder what your death will be like? Not the actual moment when you go from being to nothingness, but the period leading up to it?

I imagine we all do, and in this age it’s nothing to look forward to. (Like so many things in the 21^st century, death isn’t what it used to be.) Modern medicine is great at keeping our bodies functioning (and bleeding our bank accounts dry in the process), but not at ensuring we will have lives worth living. 

Martha (Tilda Swinton), a former war correspondent in her mid-60s, wants none of that. She has cervical cancer and has been undergoing experimental treatment, a decision she regrets. Rather than continuing to live like a junkie, in and out of hospitals all the time, she wants to get out with some dignity, a death that is “clean and dry.” 

Pedro Almodovar’s new film, The Room Next Door, follows her attempt to end her life on her own terms. As she puts it, “Cancer can’t get me if I get me first. What’s the point in waiting?” 

Her old friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) would prefer not to think about death at all. She even has a best-selling book on the subject. They haven’t been in touch for decades, but when Ingrid hears about Martha’s illness she visits her, and the two rebond as if they had never been separated. 

Which is convenient for Martha, because she needs help accomplishing what she wants to do. The problem is, while suicide is no longer illegal in the United States, helping someone commit that most personal act is. So she has worked out a plan that will allow Ingrid to be near by — in “the room next door” — while providing her with legal deniability. 

Having laid all that out for you, I must confess that suicide, the right to exercise the ultimate control over one’s body, is really not the central theme of Almodovar’s film (adapted from the 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, by American novelist Sigrid Nunez). As usual, at least since he stepped away from comedy mid-way through his career, his primary focus is on the relationship between two women brought into focus by an extreme situation. 

As such, The Room Next Door has all the usual Almodovar hallmarks, most notably the candy-colored interior designs that makes everyone look like they live in the same bag of M&Ms. This is Almodovar’s first English-language feature, and one wishes he had brought in a co-writer to help with the often stiff dialogue. It’s also disconcerting that so many of the supporting characters have Spanish accents (aside from the Manhattan exteriors, most of it was shot in Spain.) 

It’s very much in the territory of Woody Allen’s dramas of the 1980s: the characters may not be the 1 %, but they’re definitely in the top 10% income wise, to the point where money is of no concern to them, which makes it difficult to empathize with them much of the time. (I had the same reaction to the recent Ted Danson series A Man on the Inside, set in a retirement home that is substantially nicer than anything most of us will ever be able to afford.) The score by Alberto Iglesias is lovely but overused, calling attention to itself instead of moving the film forward. 

With performers as accomplished as Swinton (who doesn’t hesitate to play Martha’s most dislikeable traits, such as her disdain for her emotionally needy daughter) and Moore, a film would have to work hard not to be worth watching, and that’s certainly not the case here. I haven’t read Nunez’s novel, but I can’t help but feel that much of what Almodovar brings to his adaptation distracts from its characters and their situation rather than enhancing it.