By Brian Susbielles

At last, Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar has finally made his first feature film entirely in English. After two shorts, he’s made the accomplishment by going to his bread-and-butter, melodramas with multiple women that touch on loss, time, and death. With two of the strongest leading ladies, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, Almodovar has gone on to make another chapter of his legendary career and takes a more minimalist approach than his previous films. It’s not heavy like his previous film, Broken Embraces, but there’s enough to be satisfied. 

At a book signing, author Ingrid (Moore) is told by a friend that she ran into their former co-worker, Martha (Swinton), who has cancer. After many years apart from when they were working for the same magazine, Ingrid goes to visit Martha in the hospital, who learns that her condition is terminal. The two women reconnect and reminisce when Martha decides to plan the end of her life, renting a modernist country house and buying a cyanide pill to consume when the time is right to die. She asks Ingrid to help her and go away, and reluctantly, she goes with Martha. 

The story progresses with mostly these two ladies trading stories about their past and the separate paths that led them to this momentous occasion. Martha tells Ingrid that she is estranged from her daughter and says it seems to be irreparable. They speak on different subjects which philosophize their state of mind. Ingrid relays these discussions to her global warming doomsayer friend Damien (John Turturro), a man that both women had once dated before. Then, there is that discussion about death and the lingering suspense to Ingrid of wondering when and actually if Martha goes through with her plan.

Almodovar is a master with the emotions stirred from the past, especially with female characters. You’ve seen it in All About My Mother, Volver, and Julieta, creating a complex surface that then has to be carved through with every moment. However, from adapting the book What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, this is one of the more underwhelming stories because of the lack of emotional pull it gives. A woman has terminal cancer and asks her friend to go through with what is assisted suicide. No time or date, so there’s a suspense hanging over them, but these little scenes feel conjured to try and build that same surface from previous works. However, it comes out feeling thin.

Despite its shortcomings, the performances by both leading ladies carry The Room Next Door to the end. Almodovar’s noted colors are out on display to contrast the theme’s darkness and injects light-hearted moments to break the bleakness. It is a meditation on life before the end of it and the deasire to die with dignity and not alone. A lot like Pain & Glory, it deals with the period of life where the older we get, the more fragile things become and the quicker the desire to reconnect and reconcile with old friends and family before death.

3 1/2 stars

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