When this film won the Golden Lion for Pedro Almodóvar at the Venice film festival this summer, there were three kinds of surprised critic. Some were surprised to learn that this was Almodóvar’s first ever major European festival award; others that this should be the film to finally bag it … and then there were those who were politely surprised that it should have won anything at all. I myself found it as extravagant and engrossing and doggedly mysterious as anything he has done recently, with luxuriously self-aware performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and an undertow of darkness often overlooked by yeasayers and naysayers.
It is his first English-language feature, scripted by Almodóvar himself, adapting Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through. Though set in the US, it was also shot on sets and locations in Spain; so the English language novelty might for some expose Almodóvar’s habitual stylisation and make it look shrill and inauthentic. (And, yes, I admit it: a “war photographer” character with airily bohemian and effortless integrity is a bit off-the-peg, and reliance on the “dark web” to facilitate a plot turn is glib.)
But for me, this English-language shift only accentuates a film-making idiom, learned from Hitchcock and Sirk, which for Almodóvar is so natural and intensely felt. As ever, there is a lush, omnipresent orchestral score, seductively rich blocks of colour in the design (particularly the keynote arterial red), and – in a way utterly characteristic of Almodóvar – the story is layered and interspersed with flashbacks and incidental scenes which are semi-detached from the storytelling’s downstream flow.
Ingrid, played by Moore, is a bestselling author who learns that an old friend of hers is dying of cancer, someone she hasn’t contacted or thought about in years; this is war correspondent Martha, played by Swinton. They both dated the same man (John Turturro); first Martha, then Ingrid. The two women are warmly, even joyfully reunited in Martha’s private hospital room; the shadow of death gives a richness to their rekindled friendship and emboldens Martha to ask a favour. She intends to spend one last peaceful weekend in a rented house in the country and then self-euthanise with a special pill. She wants Ingrid to be in the next room while she does this, armed with deniability – she can tell the cops she knew nothing of these intentions.
From the outset, Martha is honest with Ingrid: she wasn’t her first choice. She asked two or three other people but they said no; an indiscretion which is later to bring Ingrid close to legal jeopardy. But Ingrid, for her part, is not honest with Martha about something even more important, despite their closeness. Almodóvar allows us to think what we will about this evasion until the very end, and it is in any case likely to be blitzed out of the audience’s mind by the extraordinary later scenes with Martha’s grownup (and less stylish) daughter.
The Room Next Door is very Almodóvarian: a dreamlike curation of people and places which is not entirely realistic, a place warm enough to sunbathe outdoors and yet at other times (perhaps even simultaneously) cold enough for snow and invocations of the last lines in James Joyce’s story The Dead. As for the timely issue of assisted dying, the characters’ obvious wealth is a palliative not available to all, but the ideas are fiercely and absorbingly invoked. Saying goodbye is what we will all have to do someday. We have to prepare.
• The Room Next Door is in UK and Irish cinemas from 25 October.
