The Room Next Door review – some­thing is missing

“Peo­ple want you to keep fight­ing,” Martha (Til­da Swin­ton) explains to Ingrid (Julianne Moore) as she reflects on her ter­mi­nal can­cer diag­no­sis. ​“If you win, you’re hero­ic, and if you lose…well, maybe you just didn’t fight hard enough.” The rhetoric around ter­mi­nal ill­ness is a source of much frus­tra­tion for the war reporter, recent­ly reunit­ed with her nov­el­ist friend after falling out of touch; per­haps being sur­round­ed by so much death, she’s come to accept that there are some bat­tles that can’t be won – only endured.

Ingrid, who has just writ­ten a book about her fear of dying, is some­what dis­qui­et­ed by her friend’s can­dour but nev­er­the­less promis­es to vis­it Martha while she under­goes exper­i­men­tal treat­ment, sens­ing her friend’s lone­li­ness in her time of need. Then, while at New York’s Lin­coln Cen­tre to catch a movie, Martha makes a mon­u­men­tal request: she is going to die by euthana­sia before her can­cer wors­ens, and she would like Ingrid to be with her when the time comes.

Of course there are clas­sic Almod­ó­var hall­marks in this styl­ish dra­ma, from the chic cos­tumes to the gor­geous inte­ri­ors in cen­tral and upstate New York. Work­ing with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Edu Gray for the first time (who also shot Tom Ford’s A Sin­gle Man and more recent­ly Rebec­ca Hall’s Pass­ing) Almod­ó­var seems at home in Amer­i­ca as in Spain, struck by the beau­ty of the remote wood­land out­side of New York City and the peace that Martha seeks with­in it. At the same time, some of Almodóvar’s eter­nal inter­ests reap­pear, such as the rela­tion­ship between moth­ers and daugh­ters, sen­su­al­i­ty, and the desire to push against the bound­aries of what is accept­able in soci­ety. Here, notably, it is the top­ic of assist­ed sui­cide – still a taboo or even a crime in many coun­tries – with Almod­ó­var advo­cat­ing for the free­dom of choice, point­ing out that in a world as fucked up as ours, auton­o­my over our own bod­ies and desires is just about all we have left.

Although the dia­logue is some­times a lit­tle clunky and very expo­si­tion-heavy in the film’s first half hour, Swin­ton and Moore sell it with their usu­al charm (it’s most­ly a two-han­der aside from John Turturro’s wel­come sup­port­ing role as a doom-n-gloom for­mer lover of both Martha and Ingrid’s) and Almod­ó­var – no stranger to push­ing the enve­lope – finds dark humour in the dire­ness of Martha’s sit­u­a­tion. It’s an ele­gant film, reck­on­ing empa­thet­i­cal­ly with an extreme­ly com­plex top­ic, but there’s a slight sense that some­thing is miss­ing, keep­ing The Room Next Door from ever real­ly becom­ing tru­ly great.

Per­haps it’s the lack of the­atrics com­pared to Almodóvar’s pre­vi­ous fair, which cre­ates a more sub­dued atmos­phere, or the deci­sion to front-load the film with flash­backs instead of teas­ing out the mys­tery of Martha’s for­mer lives as a reporter and a moth­er across the run­time. Hell, maybe it’s just the per­va­sive het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty of it all (minor flash­back involv­ing an war pho­tog­ra­ph­er friend of Martha’s notwith­stand­ing) but The Room Next Door does feel slight­ly under­whelm­ing, giv­en the amount of tal­ent behind and in front of the cam­era. In the pan­theon of films about ter­mi­nal ill­ness, it’s refresh­ing to find one that takes such a humane approach to the sub­ject of assist­ed sui­cide, focus­ing on per­son­al agency but also the emo­tion­al toll for those around the patient. One can’t help wish­ing it was just a lit­tle bit more. 

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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