Films that are straightforwardly about death are rare, but movies that are about both death and sex are rarer, still.
In Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” the Spanish director’s first English-language feature film, Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, a celebrated author who’s just written a book about death. She’s at a book signing in New York when she hears that an old friend, a war correspondent named Martha Hunt ( Tilda Swinton ), has been diagnosed with cancer.
Ingrid rushes to Martha in the hospital, and the two friends, who haven’t seen each other in years, quickly get reacquainted. Soon, Martha’s cancer worsens and she asks Ingrid to assist her in self-euthanasia. “The cancer can’t get me if I get the cancer first,” she says.
Why not ask someone she’s closer with? Well, she has, Martha says, but for various reasons none of them are willing. With an illegal pill bought from, as she says, “the dark web” and a slight conspiratorial vibe that they’re committing a crime together, they travel to a modernist house in upstate New York where Martha plans to end her life. She’ll be comforted, she believes, having Ingrid just down the hall. Martha doesn’t want any fuss, just a nice time. “As if we were on vacation,” she says.
“The Room Next Door,” the title of which plays off Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” is about finding dignity and contentment with death as a natural part of life, and, perhaps, the mystery of the relationships that end up mattering the most. The one thing Martha and Ingrid share is a former lover (played by John Turturro ), who turns up again in clandestine meetings with Ingrid. He’s preoccupied with environmental disaster and the death of the planet, but fondly recalls sleeping with Martha as “like having sex with a terrorist – it always felt like the last time.”
No one besides Almodóvar can get away with lines like this, in any language. A less fevered austerity has crept into some of his fine late-period movies (particularly “Pain and Glory” but also “Parallel Mothers” ), but within them still beats a passionate, melodramatic heart. Death is everywhere in “A Room of One’s Own.” The movie is very much in dialogue with other works like James Joyce’s “The Dead.” (They watch John Huston’s 1987 adaptation one night.) But it’s not an especially dour film, and you sense, in it’s boldly colorful designs and lush storytelling that Almodóvar is as concerned with life as he is with death.
“I still think sex is the best way to fend off looming thoughts of death,” Martha tells Ingrid.
Not all of this works, even if every bit of “The Room Next Door” feels conjured — as is typical of Almodóvar’s thickly layered films — from a fully fleshed-out emotional terrain. (Here, he adapts Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 American novel, “What Are You Going Through.”) There’s an awkward and overdone flashback early in the film when Martha recalls her painful history with the father to her estranged daughter. Some of the dialogue can sound stilted.
But what absolutely, undoubtedly does work is Moore and Swinton together. If some of the more melodramatic or crime-movie flourishes feel forced, the central relationship of “The Room Next Door” is consistently provocative. Swinton, in particular, is extraordinarily deft at finding Martha’s singular equilibrium: on the brink of death but still alive to so much — books, movies, the conversation of a friend. Death is coming, so best to spend what’s left in good company.
“The Room Next Door,” a Sony Pictures release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for thematic content, strong language and some sexual reference. Running time: 110 minutes. Three stars out of four.
