The Room Next Door, Almodóvar's English Debut, Is Elegant and Timely

The unthinkable has happened: Pedro Almodóvar, perhaps the most successful and significant Spanish filmmaker in cinema history, has forsaken his mother tongue. Twenty-two features into his illustrious career, the auteur has finally acquiesced to the unglamorous global lingua franca and made The Room Next Door, his first feature-length film in English. He joins a pantheon of other legendary directors who have left familiar national confines and crossed borders and oceans in pursuit of great cinema: Kurosawa going to Russia to make Dersu Uzala, Wim Wenders crafting an indelible vision of America in Paris, Texas, and Werner Herzog's entire career.

Still, this is Almodóvar, an auteur whose unique sensibilities are deeply connected to the streets and culture of his hometown of Madrid. Can they survive transplantation into the harsh soil of an English garden? Make no mistake, The Room Next Door, which won the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival, is definitely una película de Almodóvar. The pops of bright color, the well-crafted melodrama plotting, the abiding interest in creative professional women, and their existential concerns — it's all here. Except this time, it's in New York, with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore.

Based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, the film exchanges Almodóvar's home turf in the Spanish capital for the writer's in Manhattan. Ingrid (Moore) is a successful author with a pathological fear of death, which she attempts to unpack in her books but can't seem to fully confront. She learns an old friend, Martha (Swinton), has been stricken with cancer, and the two joyfully reconnect when Ingrid goes to see her in the hospital. But Martha, once a globe-trotting war correspondent, can't stop herself from stewing bitterly about her diminished faculties and various regrets, including her distant treatment of her only daughter.
Soon after the two reunite, Martha learns her cancer is terminal. Rather than suffer in pain and let the disease eat away at her, she decides to take her own life with a black-market euthanasia pill and asks Ingrid to accompany her in her final days. She has it all worked out — all she needs from her friend is her presence, to "be there with me in the room next door." From there, a macabre and nerve-wracking journey begins as the two women journey upstate to a rented house in the country, an arrangement that intentionally parallels Bergman's Persona. Martha will take the pill at a specified moment without telling her friend to give Ingrid plausible deniability as an accomplice to the suicide.

The film's death-with-dignity plotline has proven inadvertently timely. Two months ago, the UK parliament controversially advanced a bill to legalize assisted dying for the terminally ill. The policy has long been legal in Switzerland, where 91-year-old cinema legend Jean-Luc Godard chose to end his life in 2022. Almodóvar treats the issue with severity and class, without judgment or moralizing, though one unexpectedly histrionic character declares the scheme no better than murder. Swinton plays Martha as steely and morose, obsessing over James Joyce's short story, "The Dead," and its wintery depiction of eternal rest. She's anguished over her impending death yet resolute in her belief that ending things on her terms is the right choice. "Cancer can't get me if I get me first," she declares.

Both leads acquit themselves well, skillfully depicting the bond between the two women and realizing the director's somewhat unnatural dialogue with ease — it makes sense for a pair of literary types to sometimes express themselves a bit floridly. It's hard to make a bad film with actors of Moore and Swinton's caliber, which is why I have to question the choice to include a few bizarre, unnecessary flashbacks concerning Martha's past, which distract from the compelling performances. Bergman knew when making Persona that Bibi Andersson could transport us into her character's life through acting alone, and I wish Almodóvar had taken that as inspiration and let his performers take the reins for these sequences.
I also can't help but bemoan a certain character and context that is lost in Almodóvar's coming to America. His last film, Parallel Mothers, was a similarly tense melodrama about two women who give birth in the same maternity ward. But it also featured a moving political subplot about exhuming the graves of massacre victims murdered by Franco's Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. That kind of serious, contextual situation just isn't possible in a film like The Room Next Door. There's an attempt at injecting current events and comic relief in the form of John Turturro's character, Damian, a friend and former lover of both women. A professor, his dialogue is split between corny musings on sex and doomerish panic over the climate catastrophe. The bit doesn't exactly fall flat, but it also doesn't have quite the same power.

In the context of an ever-widening global cinema market, however, it makes perfect sense that a director of Almodóvar's stature would finally leave home. International film industries are taking advantage of Hollywood franchise fatigue by offering compelling alternatives. Korean drama series and Japanese anime (subbed and dubbed) have enraptured millions on Netflix. Bilingual productions are more popular than ever; recent successful films and TV shows made partially or totally in English include the Palme d'Or winning French legal drama Anatomy of a Fall and the hit samurai TV series Shogun. Rule changes in the Oscars' Best International Film category have allowed countries to submit films they've financed, regardless of the territory or language they were made in. This year, for instance, France submitted Emilia Pérez, directed by a Frenchman but set in Mexico, while Germany submitted The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed by an Iranian dissident who sought asylum in Europe. It seems we have collectively bounded over the "one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles," as Parasite director Bong Joon-ho called it. (He has an English film, Mickey 17, coming out this year, too.)

Why should global filmmakers in a globalized world limit themselves to just one language? Why be limited by borders and oceans when choosing a story setting? With The Room Next Door, Almódovar proves he doesn't need to tell a Spanish story to make a worthy film, even if he loses some of the spice along the way.

The Room Next Door. Starring Tilda Swinton, Julianne Moore, and John Turturro. Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. 106 minutes. Rated PG-13. Opens Friday, January 10, at Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; 786-472-2249; gablescinema.com. Tickets cost $10 to $11.75. Check for showtimes at miaminewtimes.com/miami/showtimes.