Almodóvar’s first English-language feature film is a powerful portrait of life, death, and the unbreakable bonds that help us navigate it all. At the same time, there is a sense of emotional authenticity that is lost in translation.
Beloved for their pop-color production design, playful melodrama, and fearlessness in tackling taboos, Pedro Almodóvar’s films have always felt like capricious worlds full of life and at the same time unbalanced through abrasive and extravagant dialogues.
His latest film, ‘The Room Next Door’, represents a fascinating change in addressing the topic of assisted dying with a bold sensitivity; Almodóvar’s traditional tone and look are still there, but softened with depth.
This change makes sense: it is the Spanish director’s first feature film in English, after the shorts ‘Extraña forma de vida’ (2023) and ‘La voz humano’ (2020). It was, as he has previously stated, a form to “start a new era” in cinemabut the right project for such a challenge was not found until the central pages of Sigrid Núñez’s novel, ‘Por donde vas’, focused on the conversations between a woman and her dying friend.
We first meet Ingrid (Julianne Moore), an autofiction writer who is afraid of death and even He is working on a book to deal with it.. She discovers that her old friend Martha (Tilda Swinton) is dying of terminal cancer, which leads them both to meet again and Martha ends up asking Ingrid if she will stay with her in a rented house, where she plans take a pill for euthanasia. “I’m ready to go,” she says. “I would even say I’m impatient.”
Like a play, in which time and space are reduced to a single place, Almodóvar’s film reaches its maximum expression in the bond between Ingrid and Martha, their relationship and their perception of lifewhich develops and evolves within the walls of houses adorned with vivid greens, reds and banana-themed fruit bowls.
As Julianne Moore said at the press conference after the film’s premiere at the Venice Festival: “We very rarely see a movie about female friendshipsand especially female friends who are older.
The issue of taking autonomy over our own life and death is the most crucial. Although it has already been discussed in other films, such as ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ from 2007, and ‘Plan 75’ from 2022, It’s still a very taboo topic.not just euthanasia (which is currently only legal in four European countries), but debates about mortality in general; The Western world is especially bad when it comes to facing death.
An Almodóvar-style film
‘The Room Next Door’ manages to bring these themes to light in a shocking and moving way, especially when it reaches the second act. For example, in a conversation between Martha and her ex-boyfriend, in which She tells him that she is pregnant.. His response? “I was thinking of moving to San Francisco next week.”
Or when Ingrid starts discussing the fact that she’s going to find a gym. In the middle of a conversation about death, like we’re in a world where every thought about a potential action that crosses your mind has to be said out loud.
This is not necessarily unusual in Almodóvar’s stylefor whom the forceful and melodramatic speech It is a hallmark. It should also be taken into account that it is its first translation into English. Still, it can be jarring in a script that deals with such delicate topics, losing a sense of emotional authenticity.
Hopefully the strength of the two main interpretations and the thorny issue (treated without restrictions) will make the previous point not a problem for many. Furthermore, the film’s central message remains clear: we should all have autonomy over our own existence.
Although most of us cannot afford to choose to die in an opulent glass house, with red lipstick on deck chairs the color of Hockney, we should have the fundamental choice to determine our own life and death, especially in circumstances where we are deprived of any quality of existence.
As Martha laments, “There are many ways to live life within a tragedy“; luckily, ‘The Room Next Door’ is not one of them.
