Review: The Room Next Door

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

For a filmmaker whose works are so eye popping and full of life, the subject of death might not seem like a natural fit for Pedro Almodovar. His first picture in English, "The Room Next Door," is a drama about friendship and death that is, for much of its running time, a two-woman show about some old friends who reconnect, which leads to a proposition that one be present when the other commits suicide in the next room.

Tilda Swinton plays Martha, once a hard-charging war photographer who is estranged from her daughter (just wait until you see who plays her) and has a tragic back story about the daughter's father who was messed up during his time in Vietnam. Julianne Moore is Ingrid, who learns from another old acquaintance during a book signing that Martha is back in town and is losing a battle with cancer.

Ingrid pays Martha a visit at the hospital and the two of them begin spending more time together. Shortly after this reconnection, Martha tells Ingrid that she has a pill that will kill her that she plans to take, rather than waste away from her disease. However, she wants someone to be in the room next door when she does this so that she's not alone.

She asks Ingrid to go for an extended stay in a remote locale in Woodstock, New York, where her death will ultimately take place. While there, she says, Ingrid can work on her latest book or - as she puts it - 
"go on a vacation." Martha tells Ingrid that they must plan how she will deal with the police, who could possibly see Ingrid as an accomplice to a suicide, and notes that she'll know that the day has come when, in the morning, her bedroom door is closed.

"The Room Next Door" poses the question as to how far a person would go to help a friend. On the one hand, it's humane to help someone who is suffering from a disease by being there if they decide that their life is over. On the other, there are legal ramifications and, let's face it, the entire scenario would be tough to stomach for most.

Despite the heavy subject matter, "The Room Next Door" is filled with the gorgeous color palettes one would expect from an Almodovar film, from striking shots of the two women wearing bright, different colored sweaters as they ride along in a car or Swinton's face surrounded by the dark blue of the night sky as she looks out on the horizon. In other words, the picture looks great.

There are multiple references to James Joyce's "The Dead," a personal favorite of Martha's as well as one of my own favorite short stories. The final line of the story is referenced multiple times: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."  In Joyce's story, the protagonist mourns the loss of a love who was taken too soon, but in Almodovar's film the loss is one that has yet to occur.

Swinton and Moore are, not surprisingly, very good as always, and John Turturro is made good use of as a former lover of both women and a writer with a pessimistic view of the fate of mankind. Almodovar has made some of his best films in recent years - namely, "Parallel Mothers" and the astonishing "Pain and Glory." His first film in English doesn't quite rise to the level of those movies, but it's good nonetheless as a quiet meditation on death and friendship.