If Tilda Swinton hadn’t been born in time to play the androgynous protagonist of Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), the director would have had to invent her. Ever since the beginning of her career as a cover girl for the British avant-garde, Swinton has seemed strangely ageless: a protean figure projecting a beguiling mix of Sphinx-like wisdom and fairy-tale whimsy; an alabaster statue granted benevolent sentience. In Orlando, Potter’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel, Swinton is a shape-shifter blessed (or cursed) to live for centuries beyond her allotted time. Watching Swinton in the role, you could believe that she truly might never fade, nor wither, nor grow old.
Three decades later, Swinton remains the patron saint of international art house cinema, and she brings her aura of immortality (as well an armoire full of awards) to her starring role in The Room Next Door. The title of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, his first English-language feature, underlines its design as both a chamber drama and a two-hander about women coexisting in intimate proximity. It also nods, subtly but significantly, toward Woolf’s work and life, as well as her death. As the film opens, the only thing desired by Swinton’s character, Martha, a well-traveled and now terminally ill former war reporter, is a room of her own. Once there, she hopes to reflect on the picaresque existence that she’s recently chosen to end, in her own time, by her own hand, and on her own terms; as she puts it, the cancer can’t get her if she gets herself first.
Martha’s journey involves booking adjoining berths. Her old pal (and former romantic rival) Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is a fellow ex-countercultural warrior, who’s conveniently just released a book on coping with mortality. After decades apart, the two reconnect, and the dying woman makes an unexpected request. Could Ingrid, whose life is mostly in order, possibly consider dropping everything in order to help Martha kill herself—privately and painlessly, in the palatial splendor of a rented villa in upstate New York? It’s a morbid task, combining a heavy load of moral support with a sliver of administrative finesse; beyond providing Martha with a shoulder to lean (if not cry) on, Ingrid must deal with her friend’s body without disclosing to the authorities that her suicide was premeditated and made possible by a pill procured illegally from the furthest corners of the internet.
This last plot point proves important in a movie that gradually reveals itself as a vigorous pro-euthanasia manifesto: When Almodóvar spoke at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, he was adamant that people around the world should have the right to die in dignity. The philosophy of willing and grateful self-negation—and how it intersects with broader, more globalized anxieties about overpopulation, generational apathy, and environmental decay—is woven throughout The Room Next Door, which freely adapts Sigrid Nunez’s acclaimed 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through. These are pressing and universal themes, and yet how one ultimately feels about The Room Next Door may depend less on politics or ideology than how they read the scene in which Martha and Ingrid speak in hushed and paranoid tones about the perils of surfing “the dark web.” Is it deliberate and delicious camp? Or evidence of a singular tragicomic sensibility getting lost in translation?
Authenticity in dialogue can be a double-edged proposition, as the great (and fictional) New York theater titan George St. Geegland once observed: There’s “that naturalistic thing, where the playwright is trying to say, there’s no good dialogue in real life, so why should I work that hard?” Almodóvar is surely working hard in The Room Next Door, and nearly every exchange between the leads functions as both an exposition dump about what the principals have been up to during their respective years apart and a thesis statement about the human condition. “War is sort of a man’s thing,” Martha tells Ingrid in the midst of one extended reminiscence. “You had to become one of the guys. It was never a problem for me.” In another scene, Ingrid glances at a bowl of fresh produce and declares, quietly but lustily, “I love fruit.”
The tension here between plangency and stiltedness generates a rich but amorphous atmosphere—a twilight zone of tonal ambiguity somewhere between Zen koans and New Yorker cartoon captions. Or, perhaps, a series of deleted scenes from Oh, Hello, the absurdist comedy revue starring John Mulaney as George St. Geegland and Nick Kroll as his pretentious roommate, Gil Faizon. When I saw The Room Next Door at the Toronto International Film Festival, I got flak from a few friends for suggesting post-screening that, while the film alludes to Ingmar Bergman and James Joyce, more than anything it evoked Oh, Hello’s deadpan theatricality—both as a till-death-do-them-part double act and a luxuriously romanticized vision of Manhattan, where culture vultures flock to Lincoln Center and the Strand.
Accessing a messy and multifaceted emotional truth through precisely stage-managed artifice has long been Almodóvar’s stock-in-trade. Since emerging out of a late-’70s Spanish counterculture energized by the fall of the Franco regime, the director has made a habit—and a fetish—of placing his characters, situations, and verbiage in quotation marks, not to belittle his material but to liberate it from pomposity and irony in one fell swoop. Talk to Her juxtaposes the visual language of silent cinema against a celebration of verbal and sexual communication; Volver uses a stock plot about a woman who murders her abusive husband in self-defense to subvert notions of capitalism and patriarchy. At their best, Almodóvar’s melodramatic-and-magic-realist romps somehow both fulfill and revise our collective expectations. He’s gotten so good at throwing lavish metatextual shindigs that he’s become synonymous with them. Like his countryman Luis Buñuel or his contemporary David Cronenberg, Almodóvar is a filmmaker whose surname doubles as its own best adjective.
It’s also very much a brand, and it’s through this same lens of status-conscious sophistication that one is obliged to view The Room Next Door—or, more skeptically, to see through it as a bauble of auteurist kitsch.
The temptation to beautify—and, in doing so, obfuscate—death on the big screen is nothing new. In Dark Victory (1939), Bette Davis’s Long Island socialite grows increasingly radiant in sync with the brain tumor that her dashing physician assures her will culminate in a painless, even euphoric, passing; Love Story (1970) made Ali MacGraw a Radcliffe-educated nymph challenged by her own comically inconvenient leukemia. Almodóvar, who is a model cinephile, is surely aware of this tradition and, like any worthy postmodernist, tries to use it both ways—as a shorthand for and subversion of tear-jerking sentimentality. Martha’s suffering is depicted realistically but kept at a careful distance in the hospital sequences; by the time our heroines get to the rented house, any sense of physical discomfort has been sublimated into a series of cozily posed tableaux. When Ingrid and Martha curl up to watch John Huston’s valedictory film adaptation of The Dead, the moment feels a touch too cozy, as if Almodóvar were blanketing his own identity in warm, fuzzy annotation.
It’s a potentially striking approach to difficult material: By so thoroughly sanitizing Martha’s struggle, the director is both pointing us toward our collective comfort zone about death, and strategically renovating it. The implication is that most of what we, no less than Martha and Ingrid, know about dying comes from the movies; in this context, we become obliged to imagine ourselves as protagonists in a story whose ending is all too predictable.
“There are lots of ways to live inside a tragedy,” Ingrid says, a sentiment that’s meant to be comforting but feels better suited to Almodóvar’s other films, with their wild shifts of pacing and rhythm. The Room Next Door is so exquisitely funereal that the tone itself has a touch of rigor mortis; for these characters, as written, there’s only one way to live inside this particular tragedy, and it’s in a soporific trance, gazing meaningfully at each other while patiently waiting out a foregone conclusion. There’s a moment when it seems Martha has jumped the gun on her proposed timeline, which earns a mordant laugh, but such eruptions are few and far between.
Even a relative live wire like Damian (John Turturro)—a lefty academic who has a romantic history with both women—fails to truly quicken the movie’s pulse. He keeps popping up to billow righteously at Ingrid (and the audience) about First World indifference to climate change, but he’s less a character than a mouthpiece for the filmmaker. The insistence on political and ethical declarations not only forecloses the possibility of audience interpretation but defuses Almodóvar’s ribald sense of humor, swapping out playful provocation for hectoring. (One welcome exception: a hilarious digression involving a hulking, bulbous Latino personal trainer who’s like a refugee from one of Almodóvar’s sexually turbocharged Spanish farces.)
It should be said that Moore and Swinton do their best to inhabit The Room Next Door’s pristine interior landscapes, and that, at least in terms of technique, they’re perfectly matched scene partners. No contemporary A-lister has mastered the art of listening on-screen as Moore has; she has the ability to transform herself into a kind of psychic divining rod, while Swinton is peerless at holding court, even in hushed tones. It’s telling that, in recent years, the major filmmakers who have worked with Swinton felt obliged to deploy her as a sort of special effect, including several experiments in multiplicity and doubling (by both the Coen brothers in Hail, Caesar! and Joanna Hogg in The Eternal Daughter). The Room Next Door’s attempt at a similar conceptual coup serves, weirdly, as an emblem of both actresses’ specialness and the film’s larger failure. A CGI-assisted image of a youthful Swinton near the climax not only conjures up memories of Orlando but takes the sting out of death in ways that undermine the movie’s advocacy for a humane and clear-eyed ending. The effect is poetic even as it suggests a filmmaker not quite willing to confront his subject in all its difficulty—and maybe also clearing space on his mantelpiece while he’s at it.