On paper, Pedro Almodovar working with Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton should be a dream come true. The master of melodrama behind the camera with two of the most gifted performers of the genre in front of it should produce something gorgeously emotional. And yet, The Room Next Door, Almodovar’s first English-language feature, doesn’t reach these promised heights at all, instead feeling thin and empty throughout, even if it does deliver his typical visual goods. It’s one of 2024’s more profound cinematic disappointments, and how it won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival is honestly a bit baffling.
Adapting the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, Moore and Swinton play Ingrid and Martha, both highly successful New York-based writers (Ingrid of historical fiction, Martha a war correspondent), who were once close friends but lost touch and have now been brought back together by Martha’s diagnosis of likely-terminal cervical cancer. Martha, who has obtained an illegal euthanasia pill, wants Ingrid to travel with her to a very Almodovar-y house in the woods upstate, where Martha plans to, at an unspecified point in the next month, end her life on her terms, with the comfort that she’s not alone, with Ingrid in the room next door.
It’s a ripe premise, but the emotions of it almost never convince. A lot of this is down to a simply clunky script, Almodovar’s transition into full-length English writing not a smooth one. Lines are airless and Moore and Swinton sometimes just look a bit lost – Swinton can generally convince in pretty much any role, but I had a very tough time believing in her as a war correspondent in this, a detail that always feels at odds with everything else going on in the film. It’s not helped by an ending of real tonal uncertainty, playing almost like a punchline against what otherwise feels like a pretty earnestly told story.
It does all look as great as you’d expect, though. Sharp, striking architecture houses beautiful and brightly coloured set dressing and costumes, and if you’re drawn to Almodovar mostly for the décor, The Room Next Door does at least fulfil those desires. Yet, the real core of Almodovar – the grand and overwhelming *feelings* – is so conspicuously absent that, even with the stylistic trappings, this really seems more like a pale imitation than the real thing.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 