Pedro Almodóvar, “The Room Next Door” (2024)
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature film addresses the issue of voluntary euthanasia / suicide and its effects on people’s relationships, in particular the relationships between female friends, and a mother and her daughter. Successful author Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is signing books at a bookshop event when she is informed by an acquaintance that a once close friend of hers, Martha (Tilda Swinton) is dying from terminal cancer. Feeling guilty, Ingrid visits Martha in hospital and the two resume their friendship. Martha informs Ingrid that she is tired of all the treatments which increasingly prove ineffective and has decided to end her own life – with Ingrid as her witness. Despite her own fear of death and dying, Ingrid agrees to witness Martha’s suicide at a place and a time of Martha’s own choosing. For this, the two drive to a country house leased by Martha for a month where they settle and where Martha intends to spend her last days.
As with Almodóvar’s films generally, “The Room …” is a visual stunner, with the country house looking more like an exhibition of experimental architecture and interior design than a country house, and the film draws considerable inspiration from modern literature and films from the 20th century. Moore and Swinton are good if not very outstanding in their respective roles as friends carrying past baggage (as well as a dilemma that is not resolved until after Martha’s death) and sharing personal thoughts and feelings about things from the past, the present and the future. The film’s plot revolves around these characters and their dialogue and interactions, so there is not much action throughout and the pace only really starts to pick up after Martha’s death when Ingrid has to summon medical and police authorities to register the death, and ends up being taken into police custody on suspicion of assisting a suicide with illegally obtained drugs.
A film in which dialogue and relationships are more important than action can succeed very well, and be faithful to its themes, as long as the dialogue comes across as natural and authentic – which unfortunately does not happen. Too much of the dialogue sounds expository for the audience’s benefit, rather than for either Ingrid or Martha’s benefit, and the language can seem contrived and artificial. Ingrid’s conversation with Damian, a former lover (John Turturro) of hers and Martha’s as well, especially seems forced and self-conscious, ranging as it does from climate change to neoliberal politics to the declining state of US culture. As it progresses, the film seems to pull its punches in tackling potential sub-plots and themes such as Martha’s emotional manipulation of Ingrid, Ingrid running afoul of a police officer whose religious beliefs predispose him to believe that Ingrid willingly helped Martha end her life, and Martha’s relationship with her estranged daughter Michelle (played by Swinton). Above all, the constant referencing of world literature and film, avantgarde architecture and design, and issues such as climate change and American neoliberal politics puts the characters in a hermetic world where it seems the only people worth knowing are intellectual and artistic sophisticates, with the result that the entire film ends up feeling rather flat, sterile and hollow, bereft of all warmth and authenticity – exactly the last thing you’d associate with an Almodóvar film.
We will have to wait until a more sympathetic director, capable of tackling topics such as voluntary euthanasia and the impact it might have on family and friends of the person intending to take such action, and how their relationships are affected, picks up this issue and addresses it with the empathy and compassion it needs.