At the end of James Joyce’s 1914 story “The Dead,” the main character is watching the snow fall on Dublin, late in the dark after a Twelfth Night dinner party. He’s just learned something profoundly affecting about his wife’s past, something he didn’t know until now, and it’s made him ruminative. Some day, every person he knows — even him — will be nothing more than memory. This thought is mortal, but not morbid. He finds it moving. “His soul swooned slowly,” Joyce writes, “as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Pedro Almodóvar borrows a version of that ending for his first English-language feature, “The Room Next Door,” which he wrote and directed. Two characters lounge on chairs on a deck, watching as seemingly unseasonable snowflakes fall from the sky on them. They’ve been touched by mortality, and the process has proved strangely life-affirming. One repeats the last line from “The Dead.”
This is not, it turns out, the ending of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel “What Are You Going Through,” from which “The Room Next Door” is adapted. Almodóvar’s film is more of an improvisation on the novel, borrowing some characters and plot points while telling a story all its own. (Joyce is indeed quoted in the novel, but the quote is from “Ulysses.”) Both are about a pair of old friends who reunite while one is undergoing treatment for terminal cancer. Eventually, the sick friend asks the other to accompany her upstate, where she plans to take a euthanasia pill. In the novel, which meanders and winds around many a bend, the narrator is often asked, or asking, what she is going through. It’s a riff on the philosopher Simone Weil: “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’”
“The Room Next Door” takes a more straightforward path through its version, but though it goes unspoken, that question always lurks. Returned to New York after years living abroad, Ingrid (Julianne Moore) learns at a signing for her new book that her old friend Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war correspondent, is in the hospital, undergoing cancer treatment. She visits her, and they begin to grow close. The two women both dated the same man — Damian (John Turturro), who once was full of joie de vivre but now makes a living delivering lectures about how the world is on the brink of environmental catastrophe. But their friendship stems from a shared youth working in journalism and spending their nights partying in New York.
Now, in middle age, things look a little different. Though everything looks different when death has come over the horizon. After some time, Martha asks Ingrid to come to the home she’s rented in the woods, to be in “the room next door” when she decides it’s time to go. Ingrid is frightened, and reluctant, but realizes it’s what she must do. They close up Martha’s apartment, pack suitcases and head upstate to face the end.
“The Room Next Door” is remarkably straightforward for an Almodóvar film, without the signature theatrics or sexual pyrotechnics that tend to pop up in the Spanish auteur’s work. Every conversation is blunt, each character plain-spoken and uninterested in subtext. It takes a second to get used to — movies are full of people saying the opposite of what they mean — but it also feels refreshing, and true to these women in particular. They are past the point in life where it’s expedient to dissemble, or to pretend to be something they’re not.
Instead, they discuss everything: Martha’s estranged daughter, or Ingrid’s next book, or the things they have seen and learned in life. This is a richly textured film, set in beautiful buildings and gardens. Ingrid and Martha wear gorgeously hued clothes (and lipstick) and surround themselves with books and carefully selected things. They are sophisticated, educated people who have made lives for themselves according to their tastes and preferences.
Often movies ask what makes life worth living; this one asks what makes life worth leaving. It is a controversial subject, both in the movie and in the real world, and the film doesn’t treat it lightly.
So the hovering specter of death is everywhere, but Martha doesn’t mind. For her it gives the prospect of rest, of departing the world on her own terms. Ingrid is not there because she wants Martha to die, but because she wants to show her love — to understand what she is going through, to go through it herself. It’s balanced out with Damian’s doomerism, which Ingrid can’t quite quibble with but also finds appalling. He used to be full of joy, but his version of recognizing mortality has led him down quite a different path from Martha’s.
Swinton and Moore are alone in conversation for much of the movie, two remarkably well-paired actors. Their easy youthful camaraderie returns almost immediately, and they address each other with love but also a simple self-respect. It is the sort of friendship you hope for in adulthood: honest, equal and willing to support the other even when their choice is different from the one you’d make.
Almodóvar’s films often explore doubles: mothers and daughters, pairs of lovers, twisted friends. “The Room Next Door” does the same, in several different registers, and I think that’s the point of the title. We cannot really know what another person is going through. Even if we follow Weil’s exhortation and ask, we’re incapable of fully inhabiting another person. We can’t live inside of them. The real act of friendship, of love, is to check on one another in the morning and make sure we’re still there. What we owe our neighbor is to set up camp, in whatever way we can, in the room next door to them.
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