Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature film is the equivalent of buying a knock-off designer bag that’s just about convincing – it’s more or less the same, but stare at it a bit too long and you’ll notice it says Prado or Cucci on the label.
The Room Next Door is, on paper, classic Almodóvar. Arresting pops of colour. Some end-of-the-world dread. Incredibly beautiful actors in immaculate wardrobes – in this case, the fierce twosome of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton. But despite such promise, the film is also didactic, strained and unsure of itself. After the pleasant shrug of his 2023 English-language short Strange Way of Life, it also furthers the feeling that the sensual master of Spanish filmmaking can’t help but lose something when venturing outside his native tongue.
Swinton plays Martha, a war correspondent diagnosed with stage-three cervical cancer. Moore is Ingrid, a glamorous author. They reunite upon the news of Martha’s illness, and after a handful of get-togethers, Martha asks her old friend for a favour: would she travel with her to the Kevin McCloud dreamhouse she’s rented in upstate New York and keep her company during her final days? For Martha has bought a “death pill” on the dark web, and would like someone to be residing near her – say, in the room next door to hers – when she chooses to end her life.
As they cycle through the emotions such a scenario inspires, Swinton and Moore are unsurprisingly excellent. Moore conjures a powerful mix of warmth and neuroses. Swinton is sensitive, fragile but wise, in a performance that matches the quiet normalcy of her work in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s enigmatic 2021 drama Memoria. It’s particularly lovely to see her in this sort of mode, which has become rare – it’s as if she parcels out one human being for every six or seven oddballs these days. John Turturro is also great fun as a lecturer – and, by all accounts, an insatiable sex fiend – who previously romanced both Martha and Ingrid.
But all three seem to be fighting through the Swiss cheese of Almodóvar’s script, which he adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s bestselling novel What Are You Going Through. Martha and Ingrid monologue reams of awkward exposition at one another, while the larger ideas on Almodóvar’s mind smash into the narrative with odd inelegance.
It’s especially unusual because he is typically brilliant at meshing together soapy melodrama with existential anguish – his last feature, 2021’s Parallel Mothers, was about a hospital baby swap and the psychic trauma left behind centuries after Franco. That’s so Pedro! Here, though, characters are asked to bluntly articulate their views on the neoliberal and right-wing responses to the climate crisis, or the absurdity of a terminally ill person being unable to choose when they die. There’s little breathing room between talking points.
Almodóvar’s take on America also falls slightly flat. It’s all Edward Hopper paintings and burning farmhouses, New York literary pretensions and nostalgic memories of Paper magazine, the chic Downtown Manhattan Bible that he probably subscribed to in 1987. Throw in the fact that The Room Next Door was largely filmed in Madrid (a handful of exteriors were shot in New York), and you can’t help but wonder why he’s even doing this beyond a wish to work with Swinton and Moore. Granted, that’s just about a good enough reason for The Room Next Door’s existence. But when you’re talking about one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers, “just about good enough” can’t help but be incredibly disappointing.
Dir: Pedro Almodóvar. Starring: Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola. 12A, 107 mins.
‘The Room Next Door’ is in cinemas from 25 October
