The Room Next Door

62nd New York Film Festival: Main Slate

Of the two Sigrid Nunez adaptations in NYFF62, Almodóvar unsurprisingly bests McGehee-Siegel (The Friend) who are as bum at sticking to the text as they are deviating from it (unsee, if you can, their dreadful Reckless Moment remake The Deep End). Almodóvar maintains Nunez’s blithe, gently bitchy discursiveness in The Room Next Door (taken from the author’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through?) while putting his own gloriously gay stamp on it, most evident in the trademark poppy colors (a modern movie with actual hues! — so refreshing) and the dream casting of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in the leads. This swish swooned heartily at their every onscreen interaction, as well as during a post-flick press conference where the pair clasped hands as if channeling the energies of a literal belle époque.

They’re both extraordinary, in part because they’re cast against presumed type — ethereal Tilda as the emotionally volatile war reporter Martha, dying of cancer, and ardent Julianne as the more down-to-earth Ingrid, Martha’s long-out-of-touch novelist friend who attends to her in her final months. The screw of plot is that Martha has asked Ingrid to be on hand at an upstate New York Airbnb where she will, on a random day, swallow a suicide pill she purchased clandestinely. The very real illegality of the portended act goes hand in hand with the jagged-edged compassion it requires for both women to be with each other in an unpredictable and often very uncomfortable situation.

Both ladies cloak themselves in beautiful things as comfort, like the must-have multi-colored wool sweater Martha wears while she and Ingrid watch Huston’s swan song adaptation of Joyce’s The Dead, both short story and feature providing a fabulously meta-resonant thematic throughline for Almodóvar’s project. When Ingrid tells her cynical lecturer ex Damian (John Turturro) — whose on-the-nose disdain for humanity is oft-hilariously bleak and taken direct from several of Nunez’s listicle-for-your-life! asides — that there are many ways to live inside a tragedy, it illuminates Almodóvar’s methodology. To dress up in a frequently wretched world isn’t only to rage against dying light, but to ease oneself into and through and beyond the fleeting moments that make up an existence. How one dies is, or should be, an individual choice in addition to a collective experience, all of us bearing witness in manners direct and indirect.

And of course it’s a rough road with pitfalls plenty. Strangely, I found myself most moved by The Room Next Door in several of its earlier flashback scenes that I suspect will be spotlighted as awkward outliers because the performers who play the younger Martha (Esther McGregor) and the shellshocked ex, Fred (Alex Høgh Anderson), who impregnates and then leaves her are noticeably greener. Yet I think they’re key to the cumulative power of the film, which details how our experiences etch themselves into our flesh and our very beings — toughening our hides (for good and ill), making us better actors in a cosmic production it often feels like no one is watching. Within the blink of an eye, or here a very hard cut between a youthfully vivacious Fred and his Vietnam-scarred later self, we can become, as Martha notes, “a different person.” Someone who soon after hears the reaper’s siren call in an indelible sequence involving a burning house on a midwestern plain that feels like a conflagratory allusion to Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World.”

My sense is that the skinny on late-Pedro frequently tends toward “prefer his earlier, rebellier works,” as if a more meditative maturity is, in and of itself, regressive, reactionary. It certainly can be, especially if it shrugs off or denies the pain of what came before, much in the sick-joke fashion of that great closer from Corbet’s The Brutalist where the chillingly serene Zionist niece poeticizes “the destination, not the journey.”

The journey isn’t all, but the destination is inescapably wrapped up in it. And though there are many “deaths” within a day, there are innumerable “rebirths” as well, a concept that Almodóvar gives embodiment to throughout The Room Next Door with its characters, and its actresses, flowing through a myriad of selves, the only true borders the fortified skins they live in and the climate-changed atmosphere above that twice curses and blesses them with a pink-tinted snowfall. A harbinger of the horrors and beauties to come, to experience and re-experience in blissful perpetuity/hellish ad nauseam.

Swinton and Moore clasping hands makes more sense now: Hold onto your dears…for life.