The Room Next Door (Almodóvar, 2024)

 Written by Giorgia Cattaneo

The subtle line between life and death, the duality of love and grief, brutal realism condensed with camp humour and bright colours – both very strong elements that are not new to the fans of Almodόvar’s cinema: together, they are the main ingredients of this year’s Golden Lion’s winner at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, The Room Next Door (2024), which also appears to be the first ever feature-length film in English of the world-acclaimed Spanish director. The movie, already out in selected European theatres and set to release in the USA next December, is an adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through (2020) and stars two of the biggest female names in the industry in leading roles: Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.

Ingrid (Moore, a well-known writer) and Martha (Swinton, an ex-war journalist), two old-date friends who were separated by the circumstances of life, meet again when Ingrid finds out Martha has cervical cancer and, after many years of worthless treatments, is determined to end her own life. However, she doesn’t want to spend her last weeks alone, so she asks her friend, whom she has just met after many years, to be her only companion in the whole process and, most importantly, to keep it a secret from anyone outside them. This event starts weaving the web of an absolutely out of the ordinary relationship, where everything that happens between the two – since the moment Ingrid agrees to assist Martha through her goodbye journey – feels distant from the everyday life yet extremely relatable and universal. As assisted suicide is illegal in the state of New York City, the two of them are forced to rent a house outside of town, where Ingrid is requested to stay in the room next to Martha’s until the day she decides to take the pill. We soon start to understand the reason why Martha picked Ingrid: since the beginning, what she proves to fear the most is not her friend’s choice itself, as much as the thought of losing her, to the point that she seems to try to convince herself that she is not actually going to do it. But Martha is a person who’s been through a lot in her life – we get to know a little about the tormented relationship with her daughter and her direct experience of the horrors of War – and knows exactly what’s best for her.

The way her character talks about her sick condition can sound unusual, cynical even – humour is often used by her as a tool to break the tension, especially when it’s most unexpected. Particularly emblematic is a dialogue between the two women, through which Martha gives an accurate depiction of the mental effects of her disease: while she’s always been that kind of person with lots of ideas constantly going on, who wants to read every single book and watch every single movie, she now feels like her mind suddenly went black and made her lose interest in everything (there’s a scene in which Martha asks Ingrid to watch her favourite movie together and make it the last time, but she soon turns to be unable to finish it and gets upset because of that).

To be noticed is the unlikely nature of such an intense rediscovered bound between each other; the feeling of something unsaid, that leaves the room’s door open to speculations that they might have been lovers once. A possible conclusion is that the director purposely chooses to keep a veil of secrecy on both his leading characters’ history, by leaving some details implied or barely mentioned. After all, it wouldn’t be unusual for Almodόvar to add a queer element to one of his stories.

Overall, The Room Next Door can be considered a fair win – however highly debated, as The Brutalist (Corbet, 2024) was, according to the press and general audience at the Festival, the most likely-to-win candidate in the category, but it’s certainly not extraordinary and collocates itself far away from being a cinematic cult on the same level as the director’s early projects.

There are moments when dialogues feel a bit too constructed and predictable, as if they’re coming out directly from the pages of a philosophy manual rather than the characters’ minds; probably a partially-intended effect – due to the philosophical nature of the product –, although it mostly comes out to the audience as the result of writing and directing in a foreign language for the first time, even in a life-time career.

The movie hits home with one of the most debated topics in contemporary society: the importance of self-determination and the urge for every country to have laws that make euthanasia safe and accessible for anyone who needs it (both points were highlighted by the director himself during his acceptance speech in Venice).

In a world where Death is conceived, by almost every culture that ever existed, as something “sacred” – sometimes even more significant that life itself – Almodόvar’s ability consists in talking about it in the realest possible way. Regardless of personal beliefs that one may or may not have, Death is still nothing but a natural process and every human, when it comes to bare-survival situations, should have the right to choose it without having to feel like they’re doing something wrong, or even criminal. While grief is undoubtedly the heart of the story, the movie is not intended to be painful to watch: in cinematic genres there is a difference between emotion and melodrama, and this is definitely an emotional one.

Almodόvar here approaches, with bittersweet tenderness, a view on Life and Death that is not entirely good or bad but rather focuses on the value of sharing and most importantly on one of the few powers we, as humans, have left: to live (and to die) on our own terms.

Photo credits to The Guardian, Variety, and Deadline.