Whereas in 1934 Paramount released “Death Takes a Holiday,” starring Frederic March and co-written by playwright Maxwell Anderson, 90 years later, smack dab in the holiday season Sony Pictures Classics has unleashed a movie about death in Los Angeles and New York. In Spanish director/co-writer Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” former combat correspondent Martha (Tilda Swinton) is stricken by stage-three cervical cancer and undergoing an experimental treatment. A longtime friend Martha hasn’t seen for years, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), is an author, whose latest book tour has taken her back to Manhattan.
There, the onetime colleagues at the same magazine reconnect. You know how it is with old friends – soon, Ingrid and Martha pick up where they left off and it’s almost like years hadn’t gone by without them seeing one another. When it becomes clear to Martha that the innovative immunotherapy care she’s receiving is unsuccessful, the shutterbug who’d covered war for The New York Times and was an eyewitness to death countless times, decides to take matters into her own hands and stare the Grim Reaper right in the eyes (or eye sockets, as the case might be).
To do so, Martha – who is estranged from her own daughter (the preternaturally talented Swinton also plays her main character’s own daughter in some scenes) – lobbies Ingrid to become part of her elaborate death with dignity plan, eventually convincing her to relocate to a rented house near Woodstock. At Upstate New York, Ingrid encounters Damian (John Turturro), a former lover and prominent climate crisis soothsayer who happens to have a nearby speaking engagement. Back in the day, Damian had also been a romantic partner of Martha’s. Will sparks fly again between Damian and Ingrid? Or will he bring Martha back to life with some sexual healing? Perhaps, if “The Room Next Door” was directed by a straight, Hollywood helmer, the movie, adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel “What Are You Going Through,” might have moved in a different direction.
Be that as it may (or may not), Damian’s dire, doom and gloom ruminations about global warming also express Almodóvar’s apparent preoccupation with death. Once the enfant terrible of Spanish cinema, with movies such as the eccentric ’80s’ hits “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, at 74, Almodóvar seems as if he is confronting his own mortality with “The Room Next Door’s” meditation on the final curtain.
Known, like George Cukor before him, as “a women’s director,” who featured sensuous actresses such as Penelope Cruz in films like 2006’s “Volver,” “The Room Next Door” has lots of dialogue, especially between Ingrid and Martha, as they contemplate you-know-what. Some may find all the palavering to be stagey, others may consider it to be insightful. In this sense “Room” recalls Almodóvar’s 2002 “Talk to Her,” with a philosophical tone and elegiac edge. Swinton, who starred in Almodóvar’s 2020 short “The Human Voice,” about abandonment, delivers a deeply etched portrait as a human facing the end (as must we all), and wrestling to do so on her own terms.
A prolific, protean British thespian, in 2008 Swinton struck Oscar gold in the Best Supporting Actress category for “Michael Clayton.” Moore likewise turns in a stellar, finely delivered performance in “Room” – she’s previously been nominated four times in that category and in 2015 won Best Actress for “Alice.” This may be among Turturro’s best roles in years, although he may not have had enough screen time in “The Room Next Door” to get an Academy Award nom, which also eluded his female co-stars this year.
Swinton did receive a Golden Globe Best Actress nomination for “Room,” as did her fellow Brit, Kate Winslet, for portraying a real-life war photographer Lee Miller in “Lee.” (Since 2018’s “A Private War,” starring Rosamund Pike as the real-life Marie Colvin, there has been a mini-vogue of films featuring female combat photographers, including Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny as fictitious photojournalists in 2024’s action-packed “Civil War.”)
The 107-minute “The Room Next Door,” which is Almodóvar’s first English language feature, has a variety of other plot threads. There are flashbacks to a Vietnam War-related story; mother-daughter relationships are explored, as are the dark web and the issue of the law versus ethics (often the two are, at best, very distantly related, if at all). A blast from the past is a recurring theme – with the reappearance of Ingrid, Damian, etc., in this film that is, at least in part, about how our pasts haunt our present-day lives, shaping how we’ve lived them.
This is an excellently acted drama about a very serious subject – death, and how we face it. I fear I don’t confront others’ demises directly and well, just recently losing my brother-in-law and a friend of 46 years, painter Martin Charlot; I don’t think I acquitted myself with valor. However, although cinematographer Eduard Grau suffuses many scenes with paint from a brightly colored cinematic palette, to be candid the Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa season seemed like the least likely time of the year to open this movie about the final bow, such a downbeat topic.
I realize that the Dec. 20 release in L.A. and N.Y. of “The Room Next Door,” which won the Golden Lion at the Toronto International Film Festival, was so this film could be in Oscar contention, but still, that was the wrong time for a movie about you-know-what. Be that as it may, the movie was completely snubbed by the Academy anyway. However, it opened in select cities Jan. 10 and went nationwide Jan. 17; after the holidays the theme of mortality may have been more receptively received and there may have been be more room for “Room,” as Almodóvar’s latest thought-provoking work richly deserves, even if it didn’t get any Oscar noms.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. This first appeared at hollywoodprogressive.com.
From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2025
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