Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton Are Perfectly Imperfect Together

Who could blame Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door for being more interested in its leading ladies than in contemplating death? Photo: Sony Classics

This article originally ran after The Room Next Door premiered at the Venice Film Festival. We’re republishing it on the occasion of Pedro Almodóvar winning the Golden Lion award.

Tilda Swinton convalesces in the most beautiful hospital room in the world in The Room Next Door. Her character, Martha, may de dealing with inoperable cervical cancer, but she’s also a character in a Pedro Almodóvar film, and so what should be an impersonal medical space is instead lined with tasteful autumnal wallpaper, overflowing with cut flowers, accented with a lime green chair, and overlooking a Manhattan cityscape on which, at one point, pink snow falls. When Julianne Moore, playing an author named Ingrid in an iconic burgundy lip, stops by for a visit in an early scene, I had to stifle a gasp of appreciation at all the colors involved in the tableau of their greeting embrace. Swinton reclines in bed in a bright red jacket and bold blue pants, while Moore comes in wearing a burgundy coat and carrying a navy intrecciato bag. It’s like the two have had their energies reversed in some way, the dying Martha dressed more vividly than the muted wardrobe on her vibrant friend. The Room Next Door is an alternately rapturous and ponderous meditation on mortality, though in a very Almodóvarian fashion, that exploration comes by way of a fantasy of set directing one’s own death, down to the moment, location, and outfit worn.

The Room Next Door is based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, and is Almodóvar’s first English language feature, though he’s been dabbling in English with recent shorts The Human Voice and Strange Way of Life. While it’s more minor, it works as a kind of companion piece to Pain and Glory, his 2019 drama about an older Spanish filmmaker whose many physical ailments have left him unable to work and feeling without a reason for being because of it. In this new film, it’s Martha, a former war correspondent, who finds herself unable to write, or, for that matter, to read, or listen to music, the chemotherapy having stripped her of her ability to focus and, with it, a part of her identity. And yet, this time around, the explorations of what it’s like to inhabit a failing body are experienced secondhand, through Ingrid, who just wrote a book about her fear of death, but who finds herself in close quarters with it after reconnecting with Martha, then being asked to accompany the sick woman to a getaway in the Catskills where she plans to end her life on her own terms. After the semi-autobiographical intimacy of Pain and Glory, this mediated contemplation of death from the perspective of what the dying have to teach the still-thriving living does feel like a retreat.

Still, it’s nowhere as inspirational-poster as that description might imply, even if Martha’s actual acceptance of what’s happening is the least moving part of a film that manages to also have moments of beguiling strangeness. It’s almost as if Almodóvar can’t actually bear to consider the finality that is his film’s ostensible theme. As in Pain and Glory, the past erupts onto the screen with even more sensory intensity than the present, in Martha’s recollections of an encounter with a Carmelite friar in war-torn Baghdad who was once the lover of a colleague, or her recounting the death of her child’s father, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, in a house fire on the side of a highway. In a funny aside, Ingrid has a session with a trainer in a gym near Woodstock, and when she tells him about her dying friend, he solemnly informs her that he would give her a hug, only they’re no longer allowed to touch clients due to the threat of lawsuits. She also has an encounter with Damian (John Turturro), who at different times dated her and Martha — a fellow writer who’s made a name for himself as a climate pessimist, his doomerism presented in contrast to the peace Martha has made with the time she has left.

But most of the film is spent in the company of the two women — in that hospital room, and in their ridiculously nice respective apartments, and, finally, in an airy modernist rental home in the woods where Ingrid and Martha will essentially vacation together until Ingrid decides she’s ready to go. The sequences of these two old pals trying to recapture the closeness of their hellraising youth are tender, and lovely in ways that go beyond the lushness of their ultimate location. Touches of wryness and impatience save Swinton’s performance from being too reliant on radiant serenity, while Moore lets Martha’s discomfort show in her overbright responses that sometimes come before her friend has finished speaking. In the film’s most striking image, Ingrid joins Martha in bed one night, the halves of their faces on adjoining pillows imperfectly merging to form a Picasso-esque whole that sums up their closeness and their differences. But the oddest aspect of The Room Next Door may be that it doesn’t conclude where you’d expect, instead offering a few more twists before trailing off into credits. It’s an unsatisfying ending, though it’s also reassuring in its own way — an indication that Almodóvar can’t help but keep going, eager for more stories to tell.