Sumptuous colours and discussions of death, as Almodóvar's The Room Next Door opens January 10
Subplot tangents and heightened acting as Spanish auteur takes stylized work in a more sombre direction
Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in The Room Next Door.
The Room Next Door opens at Fifth Avenue Cinemas on January 10
IN MANY WAYS, the new The Room Next Door—remarkably, Pedro Almodóvar’s first in English—lets you bask in some of the best things about the Spanish filmmaker.
First and foremost is the colour: turquoise couches, red enamelware, pink walls, and emerald-green sweaters all clash spectacularly. In one hospital scene, Tilda Swinton’s terminally ill Martha wears a pink housecoat over her hospital blues, sitting on a bright-lime chair in front of a clinic’s purply flowered wallpaper. Almodóvar hasn’t painted with this over-the-top kind of palette since the beloved excesses of the screwball farce Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The soundtrack is the colour scheme’s match, with big, melodramatic orchestral swells, suggesting soap operas and classic Douglas Sirk films. Some moments feel like a dark fairy tale—say, a sudden snowstorm out a New York window, overlaid with words from James Joyce’s The Dead.
As ever, it’s about two complex women and their relationships. In this case the bestselling author Ingrid, played by Julianne Moore, reconnects with Martha, old friend who’s dying of cancer. After a brief rekindling of their friendship, Martha asks Ingrid to stay in “the room next door” to her at a rented house in the country, where she intends to euthanize herself with a pill. It’s all carefully orchestrated so Ingrid can’t be charged by police and can plead she had no idea of Martha’s intentions.
There are a lot of extended, and sometimes stilted, conversations between the two women. The most interesting lie around the planned death. Ingrid clearly feels uncomfortable with attending it, in part because the women have not been close friends for years—but also because of the highly relatable fear of witnessing dying. Martha admits she first asked others, including her own daughters, who refused to attend her death, and you can feel the deep thought she’s put into something most of us would prefer to avoid.
The performances, like everything about Almodóvar’s films, are heightened—and at least some of the character backgrounds, such as Martha’s past work as a war correspondent, feel forced. The Room Next Door also falters in its many tangential flashbacks—another favourite tactic of the director’s that, here, draws away from the intensity of two women facing the brutal truths of mortality.
Still, there's something beyond the sumptuous colours that draws you into The Room Next Door—a dreamlike and uncharacteristically sombre film that dares to ask how we want to die, and who we want to say goodbye with. And of course, what colours we want to wear while doing it. 
Related Articles
