Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language films have operated in a particularly confessional mode. Featuring The Room Next Door’s co-star Tilda Swinton, his 2020 short film The Human Voice artfully charts its protagonist’s soul-bearing degeneration. His 2023 short film Strange Way of Life sees Pedro Pascal’s Silva dig up his torrid past with Ethan Hawke’s Jake, a small-town sheriff. Characters reflect on their shattered relationships and the images of their past selves visible in the shards. Almodóvar’s filmography has a distinct thematic tapestry which these recent exploits function as a distillation of, in no small part due to their brevity. With his Golden Lion-winning outing The Room Next Door, Almodóvar now has the space of a feature-length film (his first in English) to bring the breadth of his favorite subjects to the fore.
Based on Sigrid Nunez’s eighth novel What Are You Going Through, the film stars Julianne Moore as Ingrid, a successful author who learns through an encounter at a book signing that an old friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton), is battling cancer. Ingrid visits Martha in the hospital and their reacquaintance is the gateway into the movie’s exposition-heavy first third. We learn that Ingrid has been a war correspondent and spotty mother, both through monologuing or flashbacks, some of the latter being so over-the-top they — likely inadvertently — come off as awkwardly comedic. Over time, the film’s stiff and clunky aspects do give way to a greater fluidity as the bond between Ingrid and Martha genuinely thaws. Recognizing the opportunity and already rebuffed by closer friends, Martha then presents Ingrid with a proposition that tests their revitalized relationship.
Aficionados of the director’s work will be pleased to read that The Room Next Door is textbook Almodóvarian cinema. Female heroines, a melodramatic musical score, bright pops of color in the set and costume design, stark camera angles, complex meditations on identity through maternal and familial lenses, a little dollop of Catholic sacrilege: Almodóvar — also the adaptation’s credited writer — seems quite at home within Nunez’s material. The Room Next Door has no shortage of intertextual allusions either. There are nods to Edward Hopper, known for evocative expressions of mid-century American solitude, loneliness, and resignation in his painted works. Martha has a rant that recalls Susan Sontag’s thesis in Illness as Metaphor. James Joyce’s borderline novella-length short story “The Dead” is referenced frequently, understandably so given its own focus on love, loss, and illness. While it can all feel a bit like the filmic equivalent of scanning a six-line Wikipedia article paragraph that’s littered with hyperlinked text, his allusions don’t tip over into being overbearing. Here, they function as ingredients thrown in the pot to jazz up a dish with a simple base.
The film aims to mine the profound out of a relatively straightforward approach. Gloomier, more meditative moments don’t become too bitter thanks to the breezy ballast of lightly dark comedy peppered throughout so that the proceedings stay properly buoyant. All these elements cohere neatly, perhaps too neatly to produce much that’s poignantly raw or challenging. Ingrid and Martha’s relationship lacks any expected undercurrents of resentment or guilt. Moments of conflict are precisely that: moments, blips dotting the well-trodden emotional road The Room Next Door ambles down. During the post-screening Q&A, Julianne Moore described Almodóvar’s films as being about “witnessing the human condition.” She added that “[t]he only way you know you’re not alone is when someone is witnessing you.” The film unpacks the basic, empathetic gesture of attending to another in need, softly questioning what bounds our ideas of human decency from enablement and complicity. In a sense, it can be seen as a markedly less psychologically vertiginous spiritual successor to Persona, another film where two women share each other’s pains through an unwitting transference. Unlike Bergman’s classic, not much is happening beneath the surface here. Yet thanks to the Almodóvarian touch and some earnest performances, the textures are pleasingly rich enough to be sustaining.
Published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 3.
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