The director of The Room Next Door trademarks the movie in its opening credits: it's a Film by Almodovar -- just as earlier there were films by Bunuel. Curiously, The Room Next Door is lucid, restrained, and modest to the point of reticence. Almodovar is famous for this campy and lurid melodrama. The trashy aspects of Almodovar's sensibility are not much on display in The Room Next Door. After a couple of garish episodes, the picture settles down to be a philosophical meditation on mortality. The picture is more like a work by Ingmar Bergman than John Waters, a director whose esthetics and taste is closely aligned with Almodovar. In fact, the movie, although ravishing pictorially, is something akin to a two-hander play and, in fact, could be staged readily in theatrical form -- the film is dominated by Tilda Swinton playing a dying war correspondent and Julianne Moore as her friend. Both women distinguish themselves in the film -- Swinton's make-up is ghoulish and the eerie-looking actress seems very plausibly moribund; at times, she takes on a ghostly appearance. Julianne Moore is splendid as the victim, as it were of her friend's rather macabre venture.
Ingrid (Moore) is a novelist. At a book signing in Manhattan, she meets a friend who tells her that someone with whom she was close years ago is now dying of cancer -- this is Martha. Ingrid goes to visit Martha in the hospital. She is debilitated by chemotherapy for her cervical cancer and has been told by her physicians that her illness is terminal. Martha, a loner, wants to die on her own terms and, so, she has acquired a "euthanasia" pill with which to commit suicide. Martha tells the nonplussed Ingrid that she doesn't want to die alone -- she wants to die knowing that her friend is in the room next door. Martha and Ingrid worked together a couple decades earlier as journalists employed at a magazine newsroom. Ingrid has been a very successful war-reporter and seems to have ice in her veins. She is estranged from her daughter, Michelle, and seems to have no other friends or family. After considerable debate on the merits of the plan, Ingrid agrees to travel with Martha to upstate New York, apparently Woodstock, where Martha has rented a luxury mansion in the mountains -- it's a hyper-modern lodge with staggered metal towers and elegant art on the walls (a painting by Edward Hopper plays a significant role in the film.) Martha becomes increasingly feeble and loses the ability to walk. Ingrid cares for her, but only to a limited extent -- Martha plans to kill herself before she becomes a burden to others. At one time, years earlier, Martha and Ingrid were sexually involved with the same man, Max, played by a rather hectic John Turturro. Max is convinced that climate change is destroying the world and he can't restrain himself from lecturing everyone. In fact, he has been engaged to give a lecture at a college in the area and engages in a brief, very mildly flirtatious luncheon with Ingrid. The signal for Martha's suicide will be that she will shut the red door to her bedroom. One day the bedroom door is shut. Ingrid finds that Martha has died on the chaise-lounge chair on the back deck to the house. Ingrid is interrogated harshly by a local cop who is a religious fundamentalist and senses that Martha has killed herself with Ingrid's assistance. Max has retained a lawyer to represent Ingrid and the attorney intimidates the cop. At the end of the movie, Michelle, Martha's daughter (also played by Tilda Swinton) visits the lodge. She sits with Ingrid on the balcony of the house, both women reclining in the the lounge chairs and it begins to snow. During earlier episodes of snow glimpsed through windows, Martha recites the famous closing peroration in Joyce's "The Dead". The snowflakes falling outside the hospital are pink, a bizarre effect of climate change. Max, whose role in the film seems obviously superfluous, harangues Ingrid about global warming -- he's a scold whose romances with Ingrid and Martha have been thwarted by his refusal to collude in bringing another child into this sordid world. The isolated setting and angst on display as well as the literary citations, particularly James Joyce, suggest a two-woman play set on a remote island or somewhere in the dark Swedish woods -- in fact, there are several direct allusions to Bergman including a showy cubist image of the two women's faces in profile, a reference to Persona.
The movie is compelling but it's not exactly a barrel of monkeys. Swinton's skull seems more and more exposed with each scene in the film -- in the end, she's a scary gaunt cadaver, barely alive. (The make-up and effects are startling and it's a relief to see her appearing as the dying character's daughter, Michelle -- she's revived and come back from the dead.) There are a few Almodovar touches: a subplot involving a Vietnam veteran afflicted by PTSD has a lurid kick to it: a fire is burning in a house in a field with neither road nor pathway to the structure -- the image has the vivid surreal aspect of a bad dream. Almodovar likes beefcake in his movies -- a hunky trainer in a Woodstock gym gives Julianne Moore a little tutorial. The episode goes nowhere but it's an excuse to highlight a spectacularly beautiful young man. At the end of the movie, Almodovar forgets that he's making a moody meditation on death and the film slips briefly into a crime picture. Another handsome young man, the small-town cop, viciously interrogates Ingrid as to her friend's death, casting cruel aspersions on her. This is Almodovar's first film shot in English (although I think the mountain scenes ostensibly at Woodstock were filmed near Madrid.) He obviously has a deep distaste for American religiosity -- the interrogating cop has a nasty edge of fundamentalism that is mythical, pure fantasy, a dream of American illiberality. The most remarkable aspect of the movie is its tremendous beauty -- it's hard to figure out how Almodovar makes the big house in the woods and the character's outfits and the art around the house so ravishing to behold. But it's wonderful to see.
