The Room Next Door

Michelle Orange

A Clean, Well-Lighted Death: Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton as two women whose friendship is rekindled in the face of terminal cancer.

Julianne Moore as Ingrid and Tilda Swinton as Martha in The Room Next Door. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics. Photo: Iglesias Más. © El Deseo.

The Room Next Door, written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar,
now playing in theaters

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Shortly before my mother died, her favorite palliative care doctor objected, in print, to the notion of a “good death.” The phrase, he wrote, if not the wish embedded in it, taints with the reek of failure every less-than-good death—which is most deaths, in his experience, “despite everyone’s best efforts.” As well as a certain practicality, the job of providing comfort care to the dying had instilled in him a reverence for the limitations of his work. To accept them, after all, was to accept the whole of life: beauty, mess, anguish, joy. What place did words like “good” and “bad” have in the rooms where his patients faced their own extinction, which is to say, where they lay accompanied, alone, frightened, bold, enraptured, enraged, depleted, restored, unyielding, accepting, and too often in some form of pain?

Julianne Moore as Ingrid and Tilda Swinton as Martha in The Room Next Door. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics. Photo: Eduard “Edu” Gra. © El Deseo.

And what makes a good death, or a death good, anyway? One answer forms the central hinge of The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar’s solemn, strangely hollow first English-language feature. Loosely adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through, the film tells the story of two single sixty-something New York City–based women—Martha (Tilda Swinton), a former war correspondent, and Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a successful novelist—who renew their old but lapsed friendship after Ingrid learns, during the opening scene, that Martha is seriously ill. Ingrid then visits Martha in the private Manhattan hospital room where she is undergoing experimental treatment for her cervical cancer, bearing flowers and a tireless ear. The latter is essential: Martha has a lot to say, and a rather odd way of saying it. Swinton’s American accent, which she seems to be working free from behind a back molar, and Martha’s exposition-rich dialogue, which has the sound and feel of something run through a rusted Linotype machine (“I’m just a journalist addicted to war as an adrenaline,” she declares at one point), are features of the more general, almost uncanny tedium that pervades the friends’ first reunion and, alas, never quite dissipates.

Julianne Moore as Ingrid and Tilda Swinton as Martha in The Room Next Door. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics. Photo: Iglesias Más. © El Deseo.

Ingrid makes good on her promise to keep visiting Martha and is thus privy to her friend’s shifting moods and prognoses. Where the unnamed narrator in Nunez’s novel of connecting in the face of aging, loss, and disappointment is a frank, wearied presence, prone to eye rolls and burning asides, Moore’s Ingrid is mostly a smiling, empathic outline. Her supposed terror of death, invoked several times, only perches in the background, like one of Martha’s Louise Bourgeois prints. Full of gossip and in-group references to literary New York, the novel telegraphs the stories of various characters through a protagonist whom we come to understand as adrift, and whose eventual intimate role in her friend’s decline, with its mix of intense sorrow and revelation, returns her to the feeling, living world. By contrast, though Ingrid’s devotion is laudable, it flows uncontained, and from an unknown source.

Tilda Swinton as Martha and Julianne Moore as Ingrid in The Room Next Door. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics. Photo: Iglesias Más. © El Deseo.

During one of Ingrid’s visits, Martha, having decided to cease treatment, begins talking of her own death in aspirational terms: “I think I deserve a good death,” she says. “At least one without convulsions in my last moments. Going out with a little bit of dignity: clean and dry. But I know I am asking too much.” Shortly thereafter, Martha decides to procure a “euthanasia pill” on the “dark web.” She asks Ingrid to accompany her through her final days at a splashy upstate rental, and to be there, “in the room next door,” when she chooses to off herself.

The decision is a reflection of Martha’s highest ideals—self-possession, autonomy—and of her determination not to go out helpless, “in mortifying anguish.” It is her way of fighting, of winning, even: “Cancer can’t get me if I get me first.” This Martha says shortly after decrying, with a Sontag biography presiding on a nearby bookshelf, the battle metaphors that have long warped our narrative constructions of cancer. But Almodóvar proves uninterested in pressing on any of the story’s philosophical tender spots, leaving the viewer to ponder the extent to which Martha’s conception of a “good death” borrows from those old martial frameworks, arguably endorsing a view of death as one last thing to optimize, curate, acquire. While I love the prospect of a clean, dry, pain-free death as much as the next redhead in a Loewe sweater, the growing acceptance of medical aid in dying (currently legal in ten states and eleven countries) has opened more space for the difficult questions it raises. Unlike the novel, Almodóvar paves a smooth and stylish path for Martha’s departure (complete with a moment recalling Marlene Dietrich’s pause, at the end of the 1931 film Dishonored, her second collaboration with Josef von Sternberg, to apply lipstick before facing a firing squad), focusing on a friendship that lacks the spark of life. A figure of dissent appears in the form of John Turturro, who plays an ex-lover of both women, but his lectures on climate change, self-obsession, and anti-natalism have the same plodding, disembodied quality as much of what surrounds them.

Julianne Moore as Ingrid and John Turturro as Damian in The Room Next Door. Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics. Photo: Eduard “Edu” Gra. © El Deseo.

Among the compensations: from the makeup and costume design (seriously: those sweaters) to the decor, each shot throbs with rich autumnal tones. Almodóvar layers in references to art and literature throughout, most prominently the closing passage of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Swinton is moving in at least one moment of quiet but palpable grief, as Martha laments her inability to write, having been “reduced to very little of myself.” The string-heavy score (by longtime Almodóvar collaborator Alberto Iglesias) conjures the spirit of melodrama—if only, in keeping with the rest of the film, from a genteel distance.

It occurs to me that The Room Next Door may have appealed to Martha’s counterpart in the novel: having lost her taste for intricate storytelling, she develops a passion for the folk and fairy tales the narrator reads to her each night. Though no villain appears, Almodóvar’s latest bears the stark lines of fable, the kind of story, as Nunez writes, in which “all is simplified. Characters: types. Moral code: clear . . . There is closure, the kind of closure that mostly eludes people in real life.”

Michelle Orange is the author, most recently, of Pure Flame: A Legacy.