Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel “What Are You Going Through” — and the second mounting of a Nunez book this fall season alongside David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s “The Friend” — “The Room Next Door” is mannered in a way that doesn’t feel purposeful, stilted and stiff where it should be sumptuous, and aches of the feeling that the Spanish auteur passed his sensibility, and his script, through a direct-to-English transferal that lacks the nuances that, say, a bilingual literary translator would bring to a text brought from Europe to the United States. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, playing longtime friends who reunite as the latter decides to give up stage-three cancer treatment to choose euthanasia instead, move and speak as if in different films.
Moore is an Almodóvar newcomer who fits nicely into his gallery of sophisticated, intellectual women sifting through the past while swanning through the present in gorgeous costumes surrounded by pastel-popped, modernist production design. Swinton was the beta-test subject for Almodóvar’s early attempt at English-language filmmaking in his Euro-chic, theatrical scorcher of a short “The Human Voice.” Here, to no fault of her own, she speaks almost like an alien trying to read an Almodóvar script off cue cards held up in large print behind the camera. You might imagine that the two A-class performers, as eager as any to star in an Almodóvar project, were nervous to tell their director that the arch, airless tempo of their dialogue is not how movie characters speak even in a melodrama, nor people in even a fictional world. Would Almodóvar, whose auteur vision as ever “The Room Next Door” is through and through, have cared?
The movie begins as Ingrid (Moore) — previously the unnamed narrator of Nunez’s novel — holds a New York book-signing for her latest autofictional work, “On Sudden Deaths,” adored by a young fan who asks Ingrid to inscribe the book to her girlfriend with an ambiguous apology: “It won’t happen again.” Ingrid learns from another estranged friend in line, Stella (Sarah Demeestere), that their mutual one, war correspondent Martha (Swinton) is sick in hospital. Ingrid visits Martha and learns her long-out-of-touch friend — with whom she once shared decades of confidences, and even a lover, who eventually shows up and is played by John Turturro — has stage-three cervical cancer but is “not ready to abandon the party.” Ingrid, at first, seems almost more self-placatingly guilty that she didn’t know her friend was sick than torn over not having contacted her in years.
They walk down memory lane, with “The Room Next Door” drifting dreamily into memory sequences that recall the Alice Munro female psychodrama adaptation Almodóvar handled with a more confident hand in “Julieta,” and in the Spanish language that time. These include a reverie from Martha over her first love in the 1970s, a Vietnam War veteran taken down in operatically tragic fashion by a PTSD hallucination that led him into a burning building. But the relationship produced a daughter, whom Martha is now even more estranged from than her old friends, and who’s played in the film‘s coda by an actress I won’t directly spoil here. Though the choice will remind you of another casting cunning involving Swinton in the Joanna Hogg film “The Eternal Daughter,” it’s more a gimmick meant to close the door here with a melancholy, taped-on farewell.
With unrepentant determination, Martha opts to euthanize herself once the chemo treatments stop working, and to do so with style, dignity, and a death pill. Not in Switzerland, where supplying the means for dying is legal even as euthanasia isn’t, but with Ingrid by her side in the adjacent room of the title in a glass-enshrouded, upstate New York lakeside retreat. Seeing Almodóvar shooting in East Coast locations, such as at Echo Lake Park in New Jersey and in upper-atmosphere Manhattan, is an intriguing promise for fans of his warmly composed, stylized narratives about women tormented by their own memories in the filmmaker’s native country. But as with the engineered-into-English screenplay material, the environment doesn’t feel fully explored, even as shots of snow falling on the New York skyline evoke a wintry coziness new to Almodóvar’s characteristically hot and sunny filmography.
Martha’s nearing-the-end-of-it-all obsession with the rueful John Huston adaptation of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” which also ends with souls swooning over snowfall, situates “The Room Next Door” in cinematically referential terms, as Almodóvar always wears his influences, and then cuts them up and restitches them, with flamboyance. Perhaps because this film is about sloughing off the mortal coil, there’s passion missing this time, “The Room Next Door” an alternately colder and cloyingly sweeter departure from his past work. There are “Persona”-like shots of Ingrid and Martha cuddled up in bed, or on the sofa, that take the film just close to the realm of the sapphic without pushing it directly overboard — but your queer interpretations of this story by a proudly queer director are of course encouraged.
Moore and Swinton’s pattering exchanges often verge on Almodóvar self-parody, the actors given little subtext to work with and instead asked to speak their characters’ own directly with blunted exposition, without the psychological or poetic self-reflection that grounded movies like “All About My Mother” or “Talk to Her.” The way Ingrid marvels over a spread on the kitchen island — “I love fruit!” — is almost comically thudded. A scene involving Ingrid and a muscled-up trainer, though, at a gym she locates in the middle of nowhere, is intentionally funny, with Moore squat-jumping over a workout bench in front of the guy in an amusing visual double entendre that reminds of the earlier, kinkier Almodóvar.
The wheels of the melodrama come off in a final third that rushes through Martha’s inevitable fate — the women have a secret pact where, if the door to her bedroom is closed in the morning, it means Martha has done the deed. Turturro as climate change lecturer, and the ex of both women, drives “The Room Next Door” toward its broader pre-apocalyptic preoccupations, threading the needle from Martha’s decision to control the end of her life to a world’s end that is no longer in our control. Alessandro Nivola as a police detective briefly veers the movie into procedural territory until it’s all wrapped up rather quickly.
The backdrop of war — including a too-varnished flashback in Baghdad involving Martha on-the-ground reporting for the Times — is also on Almodóvar’s mind for the second time after “Parallel Mothers” dealt with the aftershocks of the Franco fascist regime. These are indicators of a director moving into more aggressive political territory in the later part of his own life. And Martha, too, is a kind of stand-in for the filmmaker as was Antonio Banderas in “Pain & Glory,” ruminating on how failures to fulfill our own past create unbreakable patterns in the present.
The director’s exquisite tailoring is in full flourish here, including Inbal Weinberg’s buttoned-up production design (I loved the inclusion of installation artist and painter Louise Bourgeois’s “I Have Been to Hell and Back,” a late-in-life work alluding to familial regret, hanging on Martha’s wall). Alberto Iglesias’ string-induced score, for once, though feels a bit overplayed, forcing wind into the drama and pumping in extra-diegetic air where the momentum is otherwise missing.
“The Room Next Door” ultimately feels like another beta test, not quite there yet, for what Almodóvar is trying to achieve in the English language. As did his queer Western short romance “Strange Way of Life,” whose American stars like Ethan Hawke didn’t jell as fluidly with the director’s European sensibility. Moore is closer to Almodóvar’s wavelength, and he’d be right to cast her in another English-language attempt that will, with hope, more symphonically translate to the screen. Fourth time’s the charm?
Grade: C+
“The Room Next Door” world premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics releases the film December 20.
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