Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton Contemplate Death in The Room Next Door

Much of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s work has been about vivid, immediate aspects of life: love, sex, longing, regret. He has taken some odd digressions throughout his prodigious career, but has always returned to the pulse and passion and melodrama of the human experience. Lately, though, his tone has gotten more wintry, his work—like Parallel Mothers and Pain and Glory—slowing to consider the end of all things. In his new film The Room Next Door, which premiered here at the Venice Film Festival on Monday, Almodóvar stares death right in the face, with strange and poignant results.

The film is adapted from a novel by Sigrid Nunez, What Are You Going Through, which may or may not be about the death of Susan Sontag. Like Sontag, the character Tilda Swinton plays in Almodóvar’s adaptation is a formidable writer facing her demise with a sort of analytical amazement. Martha is a former war reporter suffering from cervical cancer, which experimental treatments have failed to mediate. So she has decided to end her life on her terms: with a pill she’s acquired on the dark web, in a gorgeous modernist house she’s rented in upstate New York.

Independent as she is, Martha doesn’t want to spend her last days alone. She reunites with an old friend, novelist Ingrid (Julianne Moore), and asks if she will keep her company until the day Martha decides to take the pill and shuffle off to wherever it is we’re all heading. It seems at times that Ingrid maybe doesn’t quite believe that Martha will go through with it, though her doubt is likely invented for her own comfort more than it is reflective of Martha’s conviction. Ingrid agrees to this grim and melancholy vacation and the two make their way upstate, settling into a cozy routine as Martha takes final stock of the world and laments what she has already lost.

This is Almodóvar’s first feature-length film in the English language, which has afforded him the opportunity to work with these two terrific actors, both so well-suited to his style. (Swinton was previously in an English language short film directed by Almodóvar.) But switching out of Spanish also has its challenges. Much of the language in The Room Next Door is stilted, overly formal. Characters speak presentationally, without the slang and elision of everyday conversation. Their ideas seem sourced from a page rather than born of their imaginations.

It all takes some getting used to. But once you’ve settled into the peculiar cadence of the movie, The Room Next Door seeps in and takes tight hold. They’re speaking stiffly, but what they’re saying is insightful and universal. Almodóvar lets his film sit and stew in the enormity of Martha’s decision, exploring each facet of its implications. What thoughts emerge from that ponder are alternately scary, sad, and hopeful. Fear of death is not conquered, but acceptance and even wonder are allowed in.

There is a striking scene in which Martha bitterly explains that she has lost much of her taste for life. Her cognition, still affected by chemotherapy, is too weary for reading or listening to music. She is a person of ideas and yet it’s as if a door to her mind has shut forever. Who is she (and who, maybe, is Almodóvar) without the curiosity and hunger that has long defined her? It’s an upsetting notion to sit with, that any of us might one day be so foreign to ourselves—that our tastes and preferences and passions might not be as fixed as we thought. If Almodóvar is experiencing something like that himself, it is not evident in his recent work. We can take some comfort in that.

We can also find solace in a scene in which Ingrid and her one-time lover, played by John Turturro, have lunch and discuss the dread that seems to hang like dense, low clouds over so much of life these days. He is particularly concerned about the environment, driven to fatalism about the future. He has chastised his son for having a third child, galled by the irresponsibility of bringing anyone new into a dying world. We understand the stark pragmatism of his point, but there is also something stirring, perhaps practical in its own right, in Ingrid’s response that there are all kinds of ways to live amid tragedy and cataclysm. She chooses a quotidian optimism that may fix nothing, may not stave off any of the ruin to come, but it at least allows for moments of fleeting grace.

Such a moment may be a funny one, like the sequence in which Ingrid visits a local gym—it’s awfully sleek for something in the Catskills, and is suspiciously staffed by beautiful Spaniards—and her trainer offhandedly sighs that he can no longer physically touch clients because of “the lawsuits.” It’s a weird and silly interlude, suggesting a whole sorry story we’ll never know. It is, also, of course, Almodóvar skewering what he might see as the nervous and rigid proprieties of younger generations. Even this comic scene is mournful, too.

The film is not aiming to depress its audience, though. It is instead cathartic and energizing to witness these dire topics chewed over and spun into delicate poetry. It’s an act of communion, really, Almodóvar drawing us in close to say that yes, yes he shares our same doleful worry. Maybe it is a little bit less sad, a bit less frightening once we are reminded of how common it is, that in some ways we are all on our way out together. And then, in The Room Next Door, something amusing happens, or there is a lovely image of vibrant color—and we are carried off by that, happy in the grand distraction that is being alive.