The Room Next Door new movies december january Pedro Almodóvar julianne moore tilda swinton

Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door is a strange take on death

2.5 stars out of 5

There is an obvious, albeit disavowed anxiety about death that runs through Pedro Almodóvar’s new film The Room Next Door, his first feature-length English-language film, starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton. This anxiety about death, a terror of its finality, of its status as an incommunicable experience, provokes a paralysis in which a person can no longer fully inhabit and relate their own experience.

A writer, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), reconnects after many years with her friend Martha, a war reporter (Tilda Swinton). Martha is terminally ill and requests Ingrid’s emotional assistance to commit euthanasia. Martha has procured a pill on the dark web which will end her life, an act she will undertake in a house she has rented in the countryside for a few weeks. Martha would like Ingrid to provide her the solace of being in “the room next door” on the night she ends her life. Martha will determine the night of her death spontaneously and will signal to Ingrid that she has taken the pill and her life by closing her bedroom door on the night in question (a discovery Ingrid will make the morning after), otherwise Martha’s door is to remain open for the duration of their stay in the country.

Ostensibly, this scenario confronts death head on. However, in the face of its grim subject-matter, the film adopts a profound serenity, a cool tone of detachment where evasion and avoidance abound. Over the course of the film, death is constantly evoked, but in an abstract or mediated form, shielded from any real encounter or exposure. For example, while Ingrid is the author of a bestselling book about death, its contents are totally unknown to the viewer and her most revealing statement on the subject occurs at a book-signing when she mentions how unnatural it is that something living should die. Martha has presumably had an abundance of lived experience with the gruesomeness of death through her work as a war correspondent; she even recounts a disturbing anecdote about her romantic relationship with a Vietnam War veteran, and another nostalgic anecdote about her desire to fictionalize elements of an encounter with aid relief workers in Iraq. Nevertheless, the film conspicuously refrains from displaying any actual imagery of the horrors of war in the reenactments of these events – no visibly scorched bodies, no blood, gore or violence. The most notable secondary character is Damian (played by John Turturro), an ex-lover of both Martha and Ingrid from decades ago. He rails throughout the film about humankind’s inability to grasp the realities of climate change or to understand its incipient doom. Nevertheless, his castigation is limited to mere words. While the viewer witnesses Damian’s scolding, there is no visual evidence of the pollution that he describes. 

Aesthetically, The Room Next Door is placid. Martha has terminal cancer, but there is no depiction of pain, no vomit, excrement or bodily fluids, no evidence of the indignities that cancer inflicts upon the body. Martha is dispirited and ravaged by these indignities, but only ever speaks tearfully about them after the fact, while immaculately groomed and fashionably dressed in her hospital room or apartment. No sex is depicted and few chaotic, conflicted, or passionate emotions are displayed, though Martha and Ingrid speak often about past affairs and the vagaries of love.

In her daily life, Martha cannot observe a snowfall without distancing herself from it with a passage from James Joyce’s The Dead, which she narrates to Ingrid. When death comes, Martha does not take the pill in her bedroom at night, but in the middle of the day while Ingrid is out, and reclines on a deck chair and basks in the sun on a balcony, in imitation of an Edward Hopper painting which Martha and Ingrid notice at the country house when they first arrive.

Death inflicts a creative paralysis on Almodóvar. He cannot portray it directly, but only in mediated form, evoking Joyce and Hopper, and referencing works of art from an ever-receding past.  In this way, the film’s tone of extreme equanimity betrays itself as less a coming to terms with death than an avoidance of the terror that death inevitably provokes. Almodóvar’s reaction to this terror is an exhausted apathy, one so exhausted it can barely perform itself, and one that can barely discern an erotic, emotional or political current in life. Death, it seems, turns life into an afterthought.

the room next door Pedro Almodóvar julianne moore tilda swinton
Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in The Room Next Door

This avoidant attitude is perhaps what goads Almodóvar into the film’s signature moment, which undoes Martha’s death with the unexpected appearance of her estranged daughter. Martha’s daughter is played by Swinton, who also plays Martha. Ingrid first catches a glimpse of Martha’s daughter through the rear-view mirror of her car (another instance of an indirect approach to an emotionally overwhelming moment). Ingrid and the viewer are taken aback by this uncanny resurrection, which serves to blunt and dissimulate the intolerability of Martha’s death. 

There is a fear of death that is religious, or spiritual. There is a melancholic attitude towards its excruciating earthly pain and a nervous consolation in its necessary function, one that liberates the soul, assuring the soul’s survival. The Room Next Door is defined by a totally opposite form of the anxiety towards death. What if death is painless, an experiential non-event, a nothing? What if it is just a matter of taking a pill and no longer experiencing anything? What if the dilemmas of one’s spiritual life do not go on because nothing comes after? The prospect is petrifying. Its serenity is its hell. ■

The Room Next Door (directed by Pedro Almodóvar)

The Room Next Door is now playing in Montreal theatres.


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