REVIEW: In his first English feature, the storied director delivers a poignant mediation on end-of-life <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A good life should end with a good death. That\u2019s the premise of Pedro Almod\u00f3var\u2019s The Room Next Door, <\/em>the Spanish auteur and queer icon\u2019s 23rd feature, and his first in English. The cancer drama is loosely adapted from Sigrid Nunez\u2019s 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through. <\/em>Set in Manhattan and Upstate New York, it stars Oscar winners Tilda Swinton as terminally ill war correspondent Martha, and Julianne Moore as her author friend Ingrid, who is deathly afraid of dying. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The film premiered last September at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, where it received an 18-minute standing ovation and won the coveted Golden Lion award for best film. Its North American premiere at TIFF a few days later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ingrid and Martha\u2019s friendship dates back to the 1980s, when they both wrote for the same magazine. They also dated the same man, Damian (played by John Turturro), with whom Ingrid has kept in touch. Time and their careers have taken the women on separate paths, with Martha reporting from combat zones like Iraq and Bosnia while Ingrid settled in Paris. Their relationship is rekindled after Ingrid learns of Martha\u2019s illness at a Manhattan book signing and visits her former colleague in the hospital. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Martha has inoperable cervical cancer. Despite her misgivings, she signed up for an experimental treatment that has prolonged her life. When the cancer spreads to her liver and bones, she decides to forgo further medical interventions and end her life on her own terms in a rented house in Upstate New York, unencumbered by the past. She asks Ingrid to accompany her and stay in the room next door, the latter to create plausible deniability should authorities question Martha\u2019s death by suicide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Room Next Door <\/em>is not your typical cancer story. There is no raging against the dying light here, but calm acceptance of the inevitable. Martha would rather end her life than face anguish and diminished capacity, and Ingrid must confront her own fear of dying while shepherding Martha through her final days. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Visually, the film is pure Almod\u00f3var. Swinton and Moore are dressed in couture, the sets are worthy of Architectural Digest <\/em>or Dwell <\/em>and eye-popping colours are everywhere despite\u2014or because of\u2014the gloomy subject matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When we first encounter Martha in the cancer centre, she is swathed in red, blue and orange. Her lively attire is a stark contrast to her pallid skin and the drab, depressing hospital room. Her oversize outfits and heavy knits highlight her growing weakness: they\u2019re literally too much for her ailing body to carry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Ingrid\u2019s clothes are equally colourful, but her wardrobe does not diminish her. Costume designer Bina Daigeler occasionally dresses her in plaid, playfully establishing her as less sophisticated than Martha. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Production designer Inbal Weinberg creates spaces that embody our protagonists\u2019 states of mind. Ingrid\u2019s new apartment is a dark, cramped, work-in-progress, furnished with second-hand pieces, while Martha\u2019s is spacious and colourful, with a view of the Manhattan skyline, and filled with mementos of a life well lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The pair retreats to a striking brutalist home in the woods with clean lines and panoramic windows where Martha can die in peace. Almod\u00f3var and Weinberg forgo the minimalist monochrome aesthetics typical of such houses, choosing vibrant colours and comfortable spaces where Martha and Ingrid can cocoon, including a pair of lounge chairs (one red and one green) where the friends can recline outdoors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such visual elements are crucial to Almod\u00f3var\u2019s story because it is heavy on exposition. Martha and Ingrid\u2019s friendship is remembered through flashbacks and conversations, and there\u2019s not much action to carry the film. It\u2019s heavy on dialogue and short on momentum. Swinton\u2019s pained expressions and spare movements convey Martha\u2019s fragility and ongoing decline. At the same time, Moore\u2019s restrained mannerisms reveal a woman who has gone from passively reacting to her friend\u2019s predicament to playing an active role in her final days and beyond. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Both performances are remarkable. Swinton moves between stoic acceptance and simmering rage with great economy, and her mood changes are almost imperceptible at times. Martha is fighting exhaustion and excruciating pain to express herself. Her mental, emotional and physical fatigue is evident in every word and gesture. She is the more composed of the leads. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Moore meanwhile is tremulous and tentative at first, overly bright while awkwardly conversing with her long-lost friend. She is a reluctant player in Martha\u2019s drama and stifles her fears and insecurities to bring her compassion to the surface\u2014she cries the tears Martha refuses to shed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The film\u2019s one weakness is its dialogue. Almod\u00f3var wrote the movie in Spanish and had it translated into English. Some subtleties were lost in translation, while other stilted exchanges made it to the screen. For the most part though, the stellar cast compensates for the awkwardness and Swinton, specifically, delivers some excellent takes on death and dying. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At 75, Almod\u00f3var continues to provoke audiences, but gently. As an aging gay man with a storied career behind him, he seems to have found an analogue in Tilda Swinton\u2019s Martha, who excelled in a traditionally male occupation and had built a \u201cmobile family\u201d around her fellow war correspondents. Like an aging queer, the androgynous Martha finds herself alone as she makes the difficult decision to die with dignity at the time and place of her choosing. To do so requires her to skirt the law and enlist an accomplice willing to put compassion above societal norms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Although this is not an overtly queer-themed film, The Room Next Door <\/em>is an outsider narrative that will resonate with queer audiences accustomed to seeking care and finding joy on the margins of society. It echoes the struggles of gay men during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s and trans folk seeking gender-affirming care in the present day. It questions medical and legal overreach into our private lives and asks whether any of us have complete autonomy over our bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While medical assistance in dying (MAID) is legal in several countries (including Canada) and a handful of American states (excluding New York), it is not a universal right. Taking one\u2019s life outside a medical setting is considered suicide and strictly illegal. Planning a painless and pleasant exit requires resources available to the few. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Martha has the money to rent a luxe Airbnb in the country and the connections to acquire a suicide pill on the dark web. Through Damian, Ingrid has a lawyer who can save her from a felony charge. It turns out that dying as one chooses is a privilege, a crime and a taboo. In Almod\u00f3var\u2019s world\u2014and ours\u2014it should be none of the above. That\u2019s a provocative and powerful message in any language.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" REVIEW: In his first English feature, the storied director delivers a poignant mediation on end-of-life<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1175,"featured_media":270579,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"editorial_slug":"10","_editorial_slug":"10","exclude_from_latest_block":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"contributors":[581],"topic":[70,2936],"clients":[],"series":[],"timeliness":[61],"editorial_format":[2137],"type-of-work":[2542],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270576"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270576"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270584,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270576\/revisions\/270584"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270576"},{"taxonomy":"contributors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributors?post=270576"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=270576"},{"taxonomy":"clients","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/clients?post=270576"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=270576"},{"taxonomy":"timeliness","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/timeliness?post=270576"},{"taxonomy":"editorial_format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial_format?post=270576"},{"taxonomy":"type-of-work","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type-of-work?post=270576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}