“The Room Next Door is Almodóvar’s first film in English, and the transition is unfortunately a rough one.”

Can death be a beautiful thing, a state to long for even? Death hangs over Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, The Room Next Door, like a blanket of snow clouds, but there is much beauty in one friend accompanying another to the end, the finality a moment of peace rather than sorrow. Watching The Room Next Door and thinking back on Almodóvar’s 2019 film Pain and Glory, which was also preoccupied with death in an even more autobiographical way, one cannot escape the feeling that cinema is that one friend for the director himself. Nearing his 75th birthday, his recent output makes it clear he is thinking about the subject a lot; a sad thought perhaps, but his cinema is perhaps his way of letting us accompany him on that journey towards the inevitable. If anything, it will be framed perfectly.

Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is an autofiction writer doing a book signing for her latest novel, one in which she grapples with death. As fate will have it, she runs into somebody who gives her the news that a mutual friend of theirs, Martha (Tilda Swinton), has been diagnosed with stage-three cancer. Friends since they started working together at a magazine early in their respective careers, they have lost touch a bit, but even so Ingrid immediately seeks Martha out at the hospital. Martha, who has stared death in the face on several occasions as a war reporter, is now facing the idea that this time she can’t escape it. The two rekindle their strong bond, and one day Martha asks Ingrid to come with her to a woodland villa near Woodstock, where she intends to take an illegally obtained pill to cross the finish line. She would like a friend to accompany her and sleep in the titular room next door, where she’ll announce the moment suprême by leaving her bedroom door closed one day. She readily admits that Ingrid isn’t the first friend she asked, but Ingrid is indeed the first one to agree. Aiding someone with euthanasia is still illegal in the state of New York, and this is where Damien (John Turturro), a former lover of both women, comes in, as he can arrange things just in case Ingrid needs a lawyer. And so begins the wait; Martha waiting for the right moment, and Ingrid waiting for the painful and emotional discovery.

The Room Next Door is Almodóvar’s first film in English, not counting last year’s short Strange Way of Life, and the transition is unfortunately a rough one. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s Spanish-language novel ‘What Are You Going Through’, something gets lost in translation when moving it away from Almodóvar’s mother language. The dialogues are stilted, full of long monologues that are either exposition dumps or just verbiage that doesn’t reflect the way normal people speak, even in conversations about finality. This especially has a strong effect on Swinton’s performance. The actress, known for her quirky and outre roles, feels like a fish out of water playing a character of flesh and blood saddled with unnatural dialogue that might fit in the more artificial works that she is used to. The contrast between her and Moore, whose Ingrid is a more passive character that mostly listens and reflects on what her friend Martha says, is therefore striking. Moore, who has had to deal with debilitating (if not finite) disease on film before in her Oscar-winning role in Still Alice, gets the dramatic after-the-fact scenes, yet due to the supporting nature of her character (but not the role) it would seem there is not enough drama on the bone to repeat an Oscar nomination for this. Turturro, the final sizable role of the film, is sadly relegated to be Almodóvar’s mouthpiece, verbalizing the director’s views on another death, that of our planet and our society. Regardless of whether one agrees with the sentiments, Damien’s diatribes about climate change and the rise of the far right feel out of context and are again an unnatural interjection. Alessandro Nivola’s one-scene role as a police investigator interrogating Ingrid after Martha’s death, and Esther McGregor’s similar minimal part as the younger version of Swinton’s character to explain the backstory of an estranged daughter, are mere plot devices (and Nivola’s in particular is unnecessary). This literal post-mortem feels like padding a story that at its core is quite minimal, forcing Almodóvar to write scenes into the narrative that do not truly help it move forward and resolve the story’s stasis once the decision on the field trip is made.

The daughter’s resentment about Martha never telling her about her father would have been a far more interesting angle to explore, and is the sort of plot point that is a recurrent feature in Almodóvar’s oeuvre. While we could have done without the father’s death scene, poorly executed in every possible aspect of filmmaking, the way Almodóvar brings her back at the end of the film, now played by Swinton with a different coiffure, is perhaps the most fascinating and affecting part of the film. The daughter, obviously the spitting image of her mother, asks if she is allowed to stay for the night in the bed her mother slept in, and when she appears like a ghost behind the kitchen window in the morning wearing her mother’s nightgown, a repetition of a moment earlier in the film after a fake-out death for Martha, it is a poignant way of saying we live on after our death in the memory of our children and those closest to us. As she lies down on a lounger outside, mirroring a Hopper reproduction inside the house, but also mirroring her mother’s final resting place yet contrasting the white nightgown with Martha’s bright yellow ‘shroud’ of sorts, you are suddenly reminded that Almodóvar can still create cinematic magic. The repeated use of bright colors and the ubiquitous references to art and literature and cinema have become a staple of his work; inserting the final scene of John Huston’s The Dead is a particularly clever touch, with its falling snow complementing two other snowy moments in Ingrid and Martha’s story. But it is his strong compositional work that is the true forte of The Room Next Door, with virtually every frame gorgeously put together, in perfect balance both tonally and visually. Death is a somber subject, but at least Almodóvar can make it aesthetically pleasing and underline the weight of the subject in his mise-en-scène. Yes, death can be beautiful, and if it is as beautiful as Pedro Almodóvar makes it, maybe something to look forward to.