“The Room Next Door” Remains Closed

The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024) 1 out of 5 stars

Renowned Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, The Room Next Door, is a major disappointment. Although the subject here—death—is nothing new for the cineaste, whose recent films, including the 2021 Parallel Mothers and 2019 Pain and Glory, have demonstrated an increasing awareness of mortality, his lugubrious approach to the material refuses to let us engage with the characters. Their emotions, at all times, remain hermetically sealed within the construct of their loosely sketched biographies. It’s quite a feat to make the viewer care so little about impending doom.

Julianne Moore (May December) stars as Ingrid, a successful author who discovers, at the start, that a longtime friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton, Asteroid City), is sick with cancer. It is most likely fatal. This tragic news prompts her to visit, and soon the two renew their former closeness. As a result, once Martha learns that no treatment can save her, she asks Ingrid to assist her in ending her life.

This aid will mostly consist of being present in a leased villa in upstate New York (they otherwise live in Manhattan). Martha has taken care of the rest, even procuring the suicide pill she will take once the pain is too great. She needs Ingrid for companionship and to help clean up the post-mortem mess (since suicide, especially of the assisted variety, is not legal).

While the present focuses on the quotidian details leading up to euthanasia, Almodóvar flashes back, at intervals, to Martha’s earlier life as a war correspondent, as well as to her fraught experience being a distracted mother to a daughter. That parental estrangement plagues her to this day, but there’s nothing to be done. It’s just one of the many story threads that remain barely explored, placed in the movie for atmosphere, but never more than light dressing on a weak narrative salad.

An adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, The Room Next Door has an antiseptic feel to it, which has nothing to do with the occasional hospital setting but everything to do with the surprisingly bland mise-en-scène. The premise never rises above the level of contrivance, and try as we meet, we cannot invest in the outcomes. The real tragedy, therefore, is in the conception, rather than in Martha’s fate.

I saw this at a film festival in the fall of 2024, and at one point Tilda Swinton showed up in a secondary role. The audience laughed at that bit of casting. The scene did not appear to be intentionally funny, but merely a dramatic misfire. As is the character played by John Turturro (The Jesus Rolls), who brings very little to the table. I am normally quite receptive to Almodóvar’s work, but this one I’d rather forget.

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.