There was a time when a new film by Pedro Almodóvar was an interesting event, if not an overly exciting one. Works like Matador (1986) and Law of Desire (La ley del deseo 1987) remain the peaks in a career that would soon take a decisively different path. The Room Next Door is his first long feature in English, following the short The Human Voice, shot during the pandemic in 2020. Both films star Tilda Swinton. In the first, she is alone, and in the second, she acts like she is. Other people involved include Julianne Moore and John Turturro. The film is based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, incidentally also from 2020.

Ingrid (Moore) is a successful author of autofiction. When we first meet her, she signs books in a posh bookstore in New York. Suddenly, an old friend turns up and starts talking about a mutual friend, Martha (Swinton), explaining that she has cancer. Ingrid decides to pay her a visit to the hospital. They used to work for the same magazine, but while Ingrid continued as a novelist, Martha became a famous war correspondent. The latter seems pleased to see Martha; it will soon be clear why. The experimental therapy is not working, and Martha obtained a euthanasia pill. She wants Ingrid to accompany her to a house in the countryside and be by her side (namely, the titular room).  

I wish I had been in The Room Next Door

Martha has asked several friends before, and they all firmly rejected the idea. Ingrid seems to be her last chance. So far, the film has felt like a Woody Allen film with wealthy intellectuals of some kind gliding around without real problems, but there are differences as well. Even though the source novel, which I have not read, is written by an American author, the script is not, and there are many occasions when the dialogue is clunky beyond belief. Another difference is the colour scheme where The Room Next Door revels in the customary colours dialled up to 11. Some might try to claim that the dialogue shows the characters’ awkwardness, but that is not necessarily a convincing argument.

The house Martha rented is obviously lavish as well, filled with paintings, including Edward Hopper’s People in the Sun. There is, obviously, also a film collection, which is the perfect gift for a lazy screenwriter. They watch films like Seven Chances, Letter From an Unknown Woman, and John Huston’s adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead. Martha repeatedly quotes the book and the film. Earlier, they watched Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia with Ingrid Bergman. Yet another Ingrid, what are the odds? The name made me wonder if there could be some other Swedish references. I tried to think of any Swedish film with two women alone in a house, but I came up empty-handed. Maybe it was too subtle for me.

Other characters add to the film’s clumsiness. Turturro enters the film like a Woody Allenish character, talking about the environment and how meaningless it is to have children in the modern world. According to the script, he was both women’s lover, but it does not matter much. A police officer (Alessandra Nivola) gets suspicious and rants about the law and religion. To call these two cardboard characters would be an insult to cardboard. There is also an estranged daughter of Martha, Michelle, played by two different actors, where the second is supposed to be a surprise, I guess. There are some attempts to deal with different personas, but everything falls flat.

The sole positive aspect of the film is that it was shorter than announced in the programme. It might be that Pedro Almodóvar, at the age of 74, increasingly thinks about death, but he does not seem to have anything thoughtful to say about it. The Room Next Door has the profundity of a TV commercial, provided you turned up the colours on your TV too high by mistake. There is absolutely nothing to recommend about this film, even though the thought of Tilda Swinton as a war correspondent is worth a chuckle. Hearing her talking about the dark web is quite funny as well. The Room Next Door was presented in the 2024 Venice Film Festival competition.

This clip from The Simpsons could summarise the entire film. Watch it instead and save your valuable time.