150 Word Review: 'The Room Next Door' (2024)
Death becomes her
Celebrated Spanish-director Pedro Almodóvar's first English-language movie is a fairly straightforward look at sickness and death in America starring two actors who glow with life and intelligence.
Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton are estranged friends who reconnect in middle age; both are accomplished—a book author and a war correspondent, respectively—but Swinton's character has been fighting cancer.
She wants to die with dignity but has no one to help her, so she asks Moore's character, who recoils at first. Isn't suicide illegal? These are two lonely women who find themselves in each other. Almodóvar's movie is a colorful, slow-simmering dialogue about mortality that is full of literary and cultural references and is, occasionally, pretentious. But never bleak. The Room Next Door doesn't quite pull off its balancing act; it's more cerebral than uplifting. At times, the movie is almost too still, too quiet. Is Swinton dead in the room next door?
I loved it.
I don't support the long praise for Almodóvar. Sure, I think some of his work is great, but others were only soapies without redemption. Here, he got the balance right, a cross between a TV drama and Paolo Sorrentino's 'Youth'. Two of my favourite actresses made it work.