The Room Next Door - Film Review

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Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's The Room Next Door is an impeccably stylish film. From its graceful orchestral score to its bold colours to its stunning backdrops, it is assembled exquisitely. But there's also much substance, and what unfolds, anchored by sharp performances from Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, is an absorbing reflection on friendship, illness and euthanasia.



Based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, a successful novelist living in New York following a stint in Paris. At a book signing, Ingrid runs into an old friend who relays news of a mutual acquaintance, a woman named Martha (Swinton) who is now severely ill. Ingrid and Martha worked together on a magazine years ago and even once shared a lover, an intellectual named Damian (played by John Turturro), who Ingrid sometimes still sees.

But Martha's career as a war correspondent and Ingrid's relocation to Europe paused the friendship (the pair don't seem like social media types). Even so, Ingrid heads off to the hospital. There she learns that Martha has cervical cancer, but is happy to restart their friendship. It becomes the first of many visits and Ingrid keeps stopping by, even when Martha enjoys a stint at home between treatments (Martha's war reporting must have been lucrative: she lives on Fifth Avenue and has a breathtaking Manhattan view).

Martha eventually confides to Ingrid that she has months, possibly less, to live. She doesn't want to continue treatment and has taken steps to allow her to end her own life. She will do this in a very specific way: she will rent a house in the mountains and do it there. Would Ingrid accompany her, not to help, just to be the person in the room next door?

The Room Next Door explores the issues around euthanasia to some extent, but legal thriller is not where we are going. The film is much more interested in examining relationships, and ultimately, what happens when you face your own death. Mostly this is done through Swinton and Moore's conversations, their dialogue laden with references to literature, film and art. And Swinton and Moore are at the height of their powers here. Swinton perhaps with the greater task of portraying a mind and body in decline, but Moore no less engaging as the successful but understandably torn Ingrid.

Not everything always works. The beginning features flashbacks - Martha explaining her first lover's death, Martha recounting war stories - and some of these have a cheesy, unrealistic sheen to them. And the conclusion and the way in which Almodovar has chosen to realise it might put some off.

But these quibbles are easy to overlook. The film's great accomplishment is that it is essentially a two-hander between Moore and Swinton and yet remains entirely engrossing throughout. Almodovar's mastery of technique is something to see, with some of the images he has created, such as a Hitchcock-like close-up of Moore looking up a flight of stairs, hard to get out of your mind. This is rewarding, entertaining and thought-provoking cinema.

The Room Next Door is in cinemas Boxing Day.

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