Watching Pedro Almodóvar take on New York City’s sights, from Lincoln Center to Rizzoli, is an odd experience of cinematic translation. The Room Next Door (2024) often reads like a melodrama produced through the dusty lens of language. Characters occasionally speak in a bizarre rhythm, the dialogue being a criss-cross between Samuel Beckett and Tenessee Williams. Beckett too was obsessed with morbid topics, though he tended more toward the absurd than the drawn-out family sagas present here. This film is Almodóvar’s first full-length film in English—at times, the script bears this out. The characters deliver their lines with clipped, faltering lilts. It’s unclear what dialect the two stars are trying to emulate—certainly, it can’t be the Northeast.
Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar’s newest film is a delicious drama that masquerades as a melodrama, combining many of his infamous preoccupations: death, womanhood, and retrospective contemplation. Yet, there’s a detached quality to the film that empties out Almodóvar’s usual campiness. Tilda Swinton plays Martha, a war reporter who’s close to death and subsequently asks her famous writer friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to go upstate with her so she won’t be alone when she commits suicide. She wants someone to be in “the room next door.” The doctors, of course, are refusing to help her die with dignity. The first act of the film follows the two women as they reflect back on their long friendship while Martha’s health progressively degenerates in a Manhattan hospital. The two women were never especially close, but they share an old lover in common, a man that the audience knows Ingrid is still seeing. The graceful Martha does not.
Almodóvar skillfully takes Nunez’s novel in a variety of new directions, dwelling on portions of time the book leaves as ellipses. He especially relishes fleshing out Martha’s daughter, who is also played by Swinton like a Beckettian shadow. The film also frequently invokes another Irish writer: James Joyce. His short story “The Dead” is a poignant tale of mortality, the final line like an ancient rhyme that Swinton keeps repeating: “He heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” The cold River Styx is calling. “Survival almost feels almost disappointing,” Martha remarks.
The costumes are all in place. The furniture is beautiful. The blue night sky of New York hospital vistas recalls Joan Didion’s famous book of the same name. The AirBNB that Martha chooses to spend her final days in the second act is immaculate. Once she eventually convinces Ingrid to go upstate with her, the true fiascos and confrontations begin. With fear, with love, even the Dark Web. A rhythm sets in that will continue until the final act when everything comes undone, inevitably, like it was always meant to.
For the most part, Almodóvar plays it straight. The mother-daughter relationship is cold. The wine-red coats and furs pile on mid-century modern end tables. There is visual flair, but not too much to distract from the pristine narrative. Short dream-like flashbacks inject a small amount of freneticism into the film, while the contemporary scenes move cooly onward toward the inevitable end we all must face.
“I think I deserve a good death,” Swinton’s character states early on in a big colorful sweater. So she tries, like so many before her, to have it.
The Room Next Door screens tonight, and throughout next week, at Film at Lincoln Center.
