‘The Room Next Door’ review: Almodóvar, fixated on death

“I think I deserve a good death,” Martha laments to her friend and fellow writer Ingrid in “The Room Next Door,” a film fixated on the end — of a life, of a relationship, maybe even of the planet itself. Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature travels across the landscape of that most potentially treacly of genres, the cancer drama, locating something tough, tender and brittlely funny in this portrait of two women facing their own impasses. One has chosen to shuffle off this mortal coil. The other, terrified of dying, will be there to witness her grand finale.

Based on Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel “What Are You Going Through,” the New York-set “The Room Next Door” stars Julianne Moore as Ingrid, who has just published a new hit book, “On Sudden Deaths,” a treatise on her inability to accept mortality. That’s when cosmic irony intervenes: She learns that a beloved former colleague, Martha (Tilda Swinton), is in the hospital with Stage 3 cervical cancer. They used to work at the same magazine in the 1980s, but their paths diverged, Ingrid becoming an author and Martha reporting from war zones. Ingrid had lost touch with her friend and she rushes to Martha’s bedside.

Much like Ingrid and Martha’s bittersweet reunion, the film’s opening section is a bit awkward, Almodóvar‘s usual ease not entirely translating over the language gap during his characters’ first talky encounter, which involves a lengthy story Martha tells about her estranged daughter, Michelle. The reminiscence, complete with florid flashbacks, will become important later, but the movie’s narrative engine doesn’t start humming until Martha returns to her gorgeous Manhattan apartment and the two women try to resume their old rapport. In between gossiping about Damian (John Turturro), whom they both dated so long ago, Martha shocks Ingrid with an unusual request: She wants Ingrid to accompany her to a rental home upstate, where she plans to take her own life with a euthanasia pill. Martha’s cancer is terminal and she’s ready to die, but she would feel better knowing Ingrid is in the room next door when it happens.

Intriguingly, Almodóvar casts two of our best actors and then assigns each of them the role that would normally go to the other. In films like “Safe” and “Still Alice,” Moore portrayed characters physically and emotionally deteriorating, their fragile essence threatening to crumble. Yet it’s Swinton, best known for her major-chord bravado, who plays the frail Martha, her features gaunt and her speech labored.

This is a remarkably muted performance from Swinton, who has delivered several in this hushed register in recent years. The solitary soul haunted by a mysterious noise in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s otherworldly “Memoria”; the regretful daughter vacationing with her aged mother (also played by Swinton) in Joanna Hogg’s ghostly “The Eternal Daughter”: Lately, the Oscar winner has been drawn to women who seem to have one foot on this plane and another in the hereafter. And now comes Martha, whose certainty that she alone will choose when she goes is especially poignant. Her body may be failing, but her will remains indomitable.

“The Room Next Door,” which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, is a movie in which finality is ever-present. Not knowing exactly when Martha will take the fatal pill — Martha has rented the house for a month, promising that she won’t perform the fateful act in front of her friend — Ingrid occasionally goes to a local gym to clear her head, unable to cope with the enormity of the task ahead of her. (For one thing, Ingrid will need a lawyer in case the authorities suspect her of assisting in Martha’s illegal act.) Martha has faced death frequently on the battlefield, and yet it is Ingrid, played with quiet helplessness by Moore, who is consumed with anxiety. Not helping matters: Damian — who unbeknownst to Martha is still in Ingrid’s life — calmly informs Ingrid that the damage to the planet due to climate change is irreversible. The end is coming for all of us, not just Martha.

So why keep going? Why even make films? Almodóvar, now 75, offers his response, giving us a gentle but vibrant character study that consistently teases the possibility of morphing into a thriller. You can hear it in Alberto Iglesias’ silky Hitchcockian score, which hints at unresolved tension as Ingrid reluctantly agrees to Martha’s risky plan. You can see it in cinematographer Eduard Grau’s meticulous framing, so icy that it seems to externalize Ingrid’s wariness about what’s to come — a legitimate concern, we’ll discover, once a late-reel twist makes her abstract worries concrete.

As Almodóvar has grown older, his once-risqué films have turned more reflective. His two most recent features, “Pain and Glory” and “Parallel Mothers,” were wistful affairs, the director last showing his sinister streak with 2011’s kinky, menacing “The Skin I Live in.” But “The Room Next Door” plays like a winning combination of his sweeter and darker tendencies, his characters’ capacity for grace and compassion matched by an encroaching sense of doom, either because the world is becoming inhospitable or because Martha will swallow that pill.

Still, the filmmaker remains as defiant as Swinton’s fading New Yorker. Martha loves her life, especially as it reaches its conclusion. She’s awestruck by the wonder of simple things — including the pink snowflakes falling outside her window. What a sight, although she retains enough of her sharp sense of humor to note that those flakes only look so magical because of global warming. Even at the end, there’s room for beauty and cynicism both.