With his English-language debut The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar steps fully into the next phase of his distinguished career. The Spanish provocateur has slowly mellowed out over the years, but his themes have largely remained the same and expressed from women’s perspectives. Sexual pleasure and existential dread remain high on Almodóvar’s list of interests, but something is missing from this latest effort from the filmmaker. Perhaps it’s a translation issue, but this film is noticeably less convincing, less assured, and also less interesting even with a pair of dynamite actresses Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore.
Almodóvar and soapy melodrama go hand in hand, but The Room Next Door strains credulity even for him. Moore plays Ingrid, a renowned author who we meet at a book signing attended by dozens of fans. Her latest novel, “On Sudden Death” is a hit and young women seem to have been hooked by it. One woman asks Ingrid to sign her book for her girlfriend with the inscription “It won’t happen again”.
It’s at this book signing that Ingrid learns of her friend Martha, played by Swinton. A former war correspondent, Martha has been diagnosed with stage-3 cervical cancer and is reluctantly seeking treatment. Marth and Ingrid were close once, but their lives went in different directions. They have shared many close things, many secrets and even a man, and that old closeness has brought them back together. Ingrid, feeling guilty not knowing of her friend’s illness, agrees to see her. After some pleasantries, Martha drops the hammer on her old friend by asking Ingrid to join her at the posh place she’s rented out, and to be there in the next room when she ends her own life. “It won’t happen again” begins to take on different meanings for Ingrid through her rediscovered friendship with Martha. Past happiness will never come around again, nor will the chance to make new memories. Letting this friendship wither and fade away as it did before. These things won’t happen again.
Almodóvar’s writing has always been overly detailed and oddly specific. His characters don’t talk like normal people do; they talk like soap opera characters reading from Wikipedia. That’s fine when he’s going in-depth on a subject he’s obviously become fascinated with. Still, he’s usually doing it in his native language and with Penelope Cruz making it all work. But it doesn’t really work here and sometimes it’s laughably bad, like when Martha starts describing intimately the “dark web” and how she bought a death pill from this place you can get anything from. John Turturro, who plays Damian, the man both Ingrid and Martha slept with, can not function within Almodóvar’s system. Damian, a nostalgic hedonist who can’t talk about anything but old memories of sexual conquests, sounds like an oversexed teen or an old creeper. Given this is a movie all about conversations, it’s tough when so much of it is clumsily written and didactic, with characters bluntly reciting their feelings on assisted suicide, climate change, and politics like they are automatons following a program.
Swinton and Moore acquit themselves better than Turturro, but even they struggle with the language barrier and surprisingly shallow writing on a tough subject. As they navigate Ingrid and Martha’s knotty relationship, we’re reminded of how great it is to see these two fantastic actresses occupying the same space, playing such sensitive, textured characters. Ingrid’s fear of death colors her every interaction; she is both inviting and strangely neurotic with her friend. She always seems to be on eggshells as if waiting for some indiscretion from the past to come up in conversation. And it’s always great to see Swinton take on a role that simply requires her to be human, with all of the fragility that comes with it. As Martha eyes the end of her life and looks back at the past, she is honest about the things she has done, the places she’s been, and the people she’s let down which includes her own daughter. Despite the issues with Almodóvar’s script, Swinton and Moore are as fabulous as ever.
Almodóvar doesn’t let his fans down from a technical standpoint, though. The usual blasts of vibrant color that we expect from him are still there. His women are dressed lavishly, he indulges in literary and artistic interests from the past, and there are flashes of the surreal when least expected. If you set it to “mute” you’d never know how shaky the film actually is. In a way, it’s good that The Room Next Door happened because now that Almodóvar has gotten this English-language debut done he will smooth out the obvious problems before tackling the next one. There are few filmmakers as beloved as Almodóvar among critics and I have no doubt that this will get high marks from most of them, but when it doesn’t win any awards this season that’ll be all the evidence needed that he needs to tighten things up next time.
Sony Pictures Classics releases The Room Next Door in theaters on December 20th.
