Hal Kitchen
Many a great international filmmaker has stumbled with their first English-language feature. Naturally, they don’t abandon the instincts that made them admired in their home countries. Still, the differing industry standards and subtleties of working with a script in a different language will inevitably leave their artifacts in the finished work. Of course, the same is true in reverse, or would be if many English-speaking filmmakers were motivated to make films in a second language. Among international filmmakers, there are few more admired than Pedro Almodovar, who had until now never released an English language feature—though he did notably make an English-language short film a couple of years back, which also featured at the 2024 London Film Festival. Now he crosses that final frontier with a full-length adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through? starring two titans of British and American cinema, Julianne Moore, who’s no stranger to the postmodern melodrama thanks to her foundational work with Todd Haynes, and Tilda Swinton, who starred in that short he made during COVID. With two such stars, and one of the greatest filmmakers of our modern era at the helm, you’d think that The Room Next Door would be immune to any kind of loss in translation, and
Although you would ultimately be right, The Room Next Door doesn’t exactly put its best foot forward, kicking off with a lot of expositional dialogue that routinely feels quite clumsy. Almodovar fans are likely used to this, but there’s a contrived quality to some of the writing that does set the film off to a slightly wobbly start. The scenario being set up is that Ingrid (Julianne Moore) a successful fiction writer with a tremendous fear of death, learns that her old friend of many years Martha (Tilda Swinton) is hospitalized with stage three cancer. Once a daring war correspondent, Martha now spends her days in relative solitude, brooding over her estrangement from her daughter and is at somewhat of a loose end. Having lived in death’s shadow all her life, and previously having made her peace with her mortality, the revelation from her doctors that she might not die imminently is actually confounding and not liberating.
Thus is the stage set for a late-career meditation on mortality from three of the greats of their generation, Moore, Swinton and Almodovar. In some ways her role here reminded me of Swinton’s performance in The End, also of this same festival. Certainly, The Room Next Door‘s Martha is a much more likable character than The End‘s delusional narcissist. The role does once again see the actor grappling with the finality of existence, and the end not only of her own life, but of all things. Ingrid and Martha shared many things throughout their life and one of them was Damien (John Turturro).
Once a friend-with-benefits of Martha’s, he and Ingrid started dating seriously when she introduced them. Though no longer together, Ingrid keeps in touch with him. Damien has since grown into a leading authority on climate change and his presence on the stage of The Room Next Door acts as an intermittent reminder that Martha is facing the imminent collapse of her existence and all of humanity with her. Ingrid likes being reminded of this no more than she does of her best friend’s mortality, or indeed her own, rationalizing that there’s “more than one way to live inside a tragedy”. Though he receives much less screen time than Martha or Ingrid, Damien completes the trifecta of the film’s different perspectives on death. Damien is logically angry and obsessed by it, Ingrid tries not to think about it, and Martha, facing the most immediate demise of all, chooses to control her fate and face it with a sense of serenity. Each in its own way a rational response for an individual to take.
Swinton may steal The Room Next Door with her difficult monologues and brittle humanity, but Moore might yet have the tougher role to play as the best friend; trying to show sympathy and support to her comrade in mortality, yet she can never completely hide how uncomfortable this all makes her. She does not like thinking about death, and yet she’s forced into a situation where it surrounds her constantly, leaving her in a perpetual state of compassionate disquiet. Both give sterling performances with the bulk of the film’s scenes consisting of expository conversations between the two, especially near the start, which they carry wonderfully.
Both women clearly “get” Almodovar’s style, and they fit perfectly into the world her creates for all his films. As ever that world is present in The Room Next Door with carefully chosen color-schemes, painterly compositions from cinematographer Eduard Grau, and once again I am reminded that the real secret X-factor behind so much of Almodovar’s success is composer Alberto Iglesias, who has worked on almost all of Almodovar’s most celebrated works, contributing so much to their heady, intellectual and yet deeply heartfelt atmosphere.
The Room Next Door may get off to a slightly false start, but that sense of artifice has always been there in Almodovar’s works. He operates in a category of filmmaker like Todd Haynes, Xavier Dolan or Wes Anderson, who use the scope and scale of melodrama, as Vincente Minnelli or Douglas Sirk did: To embrace it and not deconstruct it with an exacting maturity and sense of pathos unachievable in any other medium. Moments like the ones presented in his films would feel laughably false in a more realist work. Rather, through the mechanics of artifice, we see these events mediated and elevated not to a hysterical plane, but the one on which our inner lives will exist, not in the moment of our passion, but decades after, when we finally take in the arc of our lives and see the journey we’ve been on this whole time without realizing it. That is what Almodovar captures with his work, the reflective grace of hindsight, and that’s why, in my opinion he continues to improve as a filmmaker as he enters his fifth decade of filmmaking, and The Room Next Door is a perfect vessel for that feeling.
