Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

The Room Next Door poses a compelling philosophical question. If a terminally ill, close friend asks you to be around—not in the same room as them (hence the title), but around—when they achieve a self-orchestrated death with dignity, would you do it? Should you do it?

Pedro Almodóvar is a singular filmmaker with a recognizably unique style, here having made his first-ever feature film entirely in English. There would be justifiable concern as to whether his cinematic language will translate well, and certainly The Room Next Door has some awkwardly sedate pacing. Strangely, though, the more the film goes on, the more it somehow manages to justify its own existence.

The friends in question are Martha and Ingrid, played by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore respectively, two older women who knew each other well when they were much younger but have gone many years without keeping in touch. All manner of contemplating death is a running theme in this film, and when we are introduced to Ingrid, she is at a book signing, supporting a successful work that directly examines her own deep fear of death. She learns from a mutual friend at this event that Martha is in the hospital with cancer, and so goes to visit her.

They catch up. They move through the small talk and get to substantive discussions quickly, for obvious reasons. They tell each other anecdotes that get presented to us in tangential flashback scenes with unclear purpose, though I suspect Almodóvar knew exactly what he was going for. A bit of time goes by, Martha and Ingrid get organically reacquainted, and in so doing forge a type of closeness somehow perfect for Martha’s request. Martha has already tried asking her other, closest friends, who have all refused. She can’t ask it of her estranged daughter as it would be an unfair burden to her. A clear argument is made that it is unfair to ask it of Ingrid given her fear of death, but in the end, she accepts: Martha wants Ingrid simply to be in the room next door when she ends her own life before the terminal cancer can.

Martha has a plan, and they leave New York City to rent a beautiful house together for a month in the woods outside Woodstock. And this is the deal: Ingrid won’t be given a heads up. Martha will do it once she’s ready. And Ingrid will know the deed is done by seeing her bedroom door closed rather than ajar as usual. We see Ingrid wake up on several mornings, walk halfway up the stairs, and check to see if the door is open or closed. All I could think about was the emotional agony that would put me through, how it would be all I could think about each night when I attempted, presumably with great difficulty, to get to sleep.

Through all of this, the dialogue is always soft-spoken—not deadpan so much as a sort of an oddly relaxed sadness. Martha has a bottle of sedative pills for Ingrid to use if the stress ever gets to be too much, and it feels a bit like this whole movie took one of those pills. John Turturro as Damian, the climate crisis writer and lecturer who was a lover at separate times in both Martha’s and Ingrid’s pasts, is no different. Even when he blithely refers to the entire planet being “in the throes of death,” putting a pretty fine point on Martha and Ingrid’s relationship here as a broad metaphor.

But, again, the more the story unfolded in The Room Next Door, the more it spoke to me. It took on an almost hypnotic quality in its beautiful melancholy, its very Almodóvarian visual poetry with a consistent color palate of solid reds, greens and blues, from their outfits to the deck furniture. Production design is as much a statement in Almodóvar films as anything else; in some cases more so—the line delivery of the dialogue has a slight feel of being under-rehearsed. And yet, The Room Next Door is such a quintessentially Pedro Almodóvar film that one can only assume the performances are exactly what he wanted.

Swinton also briefly plays Martha’s daughter, Michelle. Swinton has played multiple characters in the same film before (to great effect in the 1992 film Orlando), but here “mother” and “daughter” are so obviously the same person portraying them, I found it so distracting it briefly took me out of the movie. Thankfully the two characters never share screen time, which only would have made it worse.

If The Room Next Door has a thesis, I suppose it would be how to live in tragedy, particularly with grace and dignity. It’s about agency. Almodóvar does include a sequence in which a police officer is inappropriately aggressive with Ingrid because he suspects her of assisting in Martha’s suicide, which he is keen to point out is a crime. It’s a way of acknowledging passionate differences in philosophy when it comes to death with dignity, but Almodóvar throws in a lawyer pretty quickly to smooth out any narrative wrinkles the acknowledgment caused.

But fundamentally, The Room Next Door is about friendship, compassion, and sacrifice in the face of a hopeless situation. It focuses on these two women but with a pretty hard nudge to the global climate crisis, which also provides for a few moments of subtly dark humor. There’s some unevenness to the storytelling, but Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore go a long way to make up for it, even in their muted grief. The Room Next Door merely skirts the edges of “tearjerker” status, mercifully dispensing with any melodrama. I kept thinking less about the story structure than how effective its mood was, for several minutes after I left the theater. It felt like the film had worked exactly as intended.

*As artists get older, it follows that more of their art would be about death.*

Overall: B+