After years marked by cold feet and false starts, the great Pedro Almodóvar made his English-language debut with 2020’s “The Human Voice.” The Spanish filmmaker started off easy, adapting a Jean Cocteau one-act into a 30-minute monologue delivered by Tilda Swinton — and the film was a charmer, breaking out of that year’s COVID-defiant Venice Film Festival, where it united a deeply improbable, socially distanced event.
The filmmaker more than doubled the number of speaking roles for his next short, “Strange Way of Life,” and now, four decades into his career, Almodóvar returns to Venice to premiere his long-awaited U.S.-set feature (which, of course, he mostly shot in Spain).
Though adapted from a wholly separate text to tell a very different story, “The Room Next Door” evokes an uncanny case of sequelitis, bulking up the form of Almodóvar’s 2020 short to play as a series of Swinton monologues, while welcoming Julianne Moore into the mix as a sympathetic ear. And if the three main draws are too confirmed in respective talents to deliver a subpar performance or a slipshod composition, their shared billing can never quite deliver this film from listlessness.
Trying to case “The Room Next Door” for structural weakness, one will invariably land on a certain lost-in-translation verbosity. But then, that same torrent of talk is inherent to a film about a pair of writers using their innate abilities to make sense of — and to make way for — impending death. Acclaimed war correspondent Martha (Swinton) is the one dying, and that leaves her with much on the mind. Facing inoperable cancer and an unfixable relationship with her own adult daughter, the journalist seeks companionship from a long-lost friend to help structure her final days.
Ingrid (Moore) is that friend. A culture critic and author of a recent bestseller detailing her personal ambivalence to mortality, the writer becomes an active listener as her old pal fills the quiet of a hospital room, then an empty apartment and later a modernist house upstate with all the words still left inside. Only those words have an equally uncanny quality, and a declarative syntax less common to scribes than to the large language models us writers are told might one day take our jobs.
So the issue then seems less of translation — with the caveat that my own Spanish is limited, Iberian syntax seems more poetic than point-and-describe — and more an odd choice to leave nothing unsaid. No friend of mine evokes our shared past with the expository flair of a table-of-contents (“Do you remember when we used to work at the same magazine?” Martha asks. “That was in the 1980s,” comes the follow-up), nor do they need to describe an image as blatant as a blazing house with this pithy summation: “That house is burning!” Only these characters do — and for the life of me I cannot figure out why.
Of course, the film is not for the life of me, but rather Martha as her illness is rapidly bringing that to close. Or at least, illness would if not for the euthanasia pill our intrepid reporter scored off the dark web. “Cancer can’t get me if I get me first,” Martha says as she and Ingrid take off upstate for one final game.
The rules are simple and nerve-wracking: Martha will take the pill at an undisclosed time, with Ingrid receiving no advanced warning. One needn’t strain to see the appeal, for the pill returns agency and unpredictability to a life otherwise condemned by fate, but it leaves Ingrid in an awful way. And here, one can also notice the filmmaker’s wider game, because whenever Martha’s voice falls off, we recall that activist poster linking silence to death. The film is piercing in silence.
Structured as a kind of verbal dance where Swinton takes the lead, “The Room Next Door” finds time to better shade in Moore’s character whenever Ingrid leaves the rented house. Apart from stress-relieving visits to a nearby gym (where all the staff is Spanish in a rather knowing and rather funny wink), she mostly sees an eco-doomer academic (John Turturro) that both women count as an ex-flame. Himself an author (his catchy-titled beach-read “How Bad Can It Get”), the morose nerd mostly uses the occasion to defend his hard-won nihilism. Here, too, does Ingrid stay the same impassive listener, though she allows the odd interaction to better define the film’s wider take. There are many ways to navigate tragedy, she notes, and bearing witness to death does not preclude living.
The dialogue rings true, perhaps for the first time in a film with no lack of it. And once the closing act introduces characters more closely tied to life — including a vision of Swinton wholly different from what came before — we can better trace Almodóvar’s construction. More emaciated and pale than usual, but with that same shock of golden hair, Swinton appears as a fading candle for nearly all her screen time. Her late return in a rather different guise only testifies to Almodóvar’s still masterful visual command. What a pity then that he couldn’t find the words to match.
“The Room Next Door” premieres Monday in Venice and on Oct. 18 in Spain.
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