It is clear that “The Room Next Door” is a Pedro Almodóvar film. It features strong female heroines in Tilda Swinton’s Martha and Julianne Moore’s Ingrid and a striking use of color, with a heavy presence of bright reds and greens accompanied by Alberto Iglesias’s vibrant melodramatic score. Still, there is something not quite right about this one Almodóvar film, a dramedy that emulates all that makes a story Almodovarian but bypasses its essence entirely.
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At a book signing shortly after moving back to New York from Paris, author Ingrid hears the news that her longtime friend Martha is in the hospital for cancer treatment. That first visit makes clear that the years the two spent apart are of little matter to the intensity of their friendship, and soon enough, Ingrid becomes Martha’s most regular visitor, spending long afternoons alongside the journalist as tubes pump chemicals through her weakened veins.
The duo’s much-needed catch-up is handy to Almodóvar, who crams the earlier dialogue with a whopping amount of exposition. In a brief scene by the large windows of the expensive-looking hospital room, we learn that both women met while working at a magazine, eventually branching out to vastly different arms of writing: Ingrid, a novelist, and Martha, a war journalist. We learn, too, that both are unmarried and only Martha has children, an only daughter to whom she barely speaks to. Despite lacking traditional families, neither woman ever comes across as lonely, having found in their careers the kind of satisfaction reserved only for those lucky enough to have a job that matches their true calling.
“The Room Next Door” marks Almodóvar’s first English-language feature and comes just over a year after the Ethan Hawke/Pedro Pascal short western “Strange Way of Life” gave the director a chance to try his hand at it. Alas, the script, based on Sigrid Nunez’s novel “What Are You Going Through,” feels oddly stunted, almost as if the Spanish director wrote it in his native language and then translated it, losing part of the words’s natural rhythm in the process.
The dialogue only gets less calcified once the film’s premise finally becomes clear. After Martha realizes her treatment is not working, she decides to stop care altogether. Death doesn’t scare her, but dying alone does, and so she pleads with Ingrid to be in the titular room next door when she takes the pill that will stop her suffering. This unusual request sees the women leave New York City for a beautiful house in Woodstock, where Almodóvar begins to prod at the fertile relationship between mortality and creativity at last.
In death, Martha feels an urge to revisit life, and Ingrid, as all good writers do, is eager to listen. This places Swinton and Moore as polar opposites, the former beautifully delivering monologues about the desire that spawns out of the urgency of survival while the latter lovingly listens, yearning to consume every sliver of information she can get, a hunger exacerbated by a deep awareness of the preciousness of time. Unfortunately, the film is all too willing to dilute the potency of this seesawing by reprising it time and time again in a frustrating loop that drags the film’s second act.
This repetitiveness leads to frustration, but luckily, “The Room Next Door” bears Almodóvar’s sharp sense of style, which proves to be a much-needed stimulus whenever interest in the characters dwindles. The director finds some of the most stunning interior locations in New York in his filmography, made even more so by the work of “Suspiria” production designer Inbal Weinberg. The urban sequences feature a mix of rustic and maximalist designs found in the women’s apartments, from Martha’s dramatic red and green kitchen counters to Ingrid’s gorgeous mix of unworked wood and mismatched artwork hung on cavernous dark walls. The sharp lines of the modern house in Woodstock mirror those of Swinton’s striking face, while the softness of the daylight that floods the large living spaces cleverly aids Almodóvar’s intent to do away with the figural darkness often attributed to conversations around death.
The last few years have seen a crop of renowned filmmakers process aging and mortality through film — Scorsese, Schrader, Cronenberg, and Spielberg, to name a few. It is a shame, then, that Almodóvar’s contribution to this canon lacks much of his signature subversion, with “The Room Next Door” a surprisingly vapid case of style over substance, unable to mask its tameness under the smokescreen of a peculiar premise. [C]
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Sony Pictures Classics will release “The Room Next Door” on December 20.