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September 8, 2024A woman with terminal cancer asks a complicated favor of an old friend in this adaptation of a Sigrid Nunez novel, also featuring John Turturro and Alessandro Nivola.
The Room Next Door
A mixed bag that eventually delivers.
No male filmmaker has more consistently understood female characters and the actresses playing them than Pedro Almodóvar, a virtue that rescues the treasured director’s first English-language feature from the reams of prose-style dialogue in its establishing scenes. Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, in which a terminally ill woman asks an old friend for her companionship as she prepares to end her life, the Spanish writer-director takes time to shake off that stilted, page-bound quality. But a change of scene and the luminous screen presences of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore breathe life into The Room Next Door.
In The Room Next Door, melodrama and theatricality are tamped down, resulting in a very measured drama about life, death and the responsibilities of friendship that at times risks becoming an arid intellectual exercise. Without two such accomplished lead actors, it’s doubtful this would work at all.
Production designer Inbal Weinberg makes every meticulously dressed interior a distinctive frame in which to observe the two women protagonists. But it’s when the story leaves Manhattan and heads to a luxury modernist rental near Woodstock that it starts acquiring emotional vitality.
Tucked away in a woodsy setting, that house is an architectural delight, a cluster of what look like cubic boxes in wood and glass almost inviting us to arrange and unpack them, while freeing up the movie to do the same with its characters.
The interiors continue that function with sharp geometric lines to dissect the women. A shot in which they lounge side by side on upholstered deckchairs, mirroring a copy of Edward Hopper’s People in the Sun hanging inside, becomes an ingenious trick of color-blocking. DP Eduard Grau’s camera moves in close, separating the characters from their surroundings along with any last vestiges of distance between us and them.
The awkwardness of semi-estrangement melts away instantly when Ingrid visits the hospital and Martha explains that she’s agreed to be a guinea pig in an experimental treatment for her Stage 3 cervical cancer.
Unfortunately, she then launches into a lengthy background recap that feels almost as if Swinton is reading book excerpts off cue cards. Also, much of the information Martha shares would surely be familiar to Ingrid because it predates their time as magazine colleagues. It’s in this opening stretch in particular that you might wish Almodóvar had worked with a co-writer able to loosen up the English dialogue and make it more fluid.
Martha reveals that she has minimal contact with Michelle, the daughter she had in her teens, for whom she never developed much maternal feeling. She says Michelle resented not having a father ever since she was a little girl. Scenes from the past materialize revealing Martha’s brief relationship with the father, his return from Vietnam as a damaged man and the tragic accident that took his life. This allows for a striking visual set-piece even if it feels extraneous.