“The Room Next Door” is Stylish and Even Watchable . . . But Not Brave Enough
by Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” enacts a rare life event that most of us don’t want to contemplate even vicariously. By now everyone knows the donnée: A war correspondent (Tilda Swinton), unmarried, estranged from her daughter, after failing to find other companionship, asks Julianne Moore, a writer and former friend, to accompany her in her cancer-facing dying. The first aim of the great film-maker must be to make this encounter watchable to vulnerable people in the audience. So many of us are vulnerable: we know someone with cancer, or we have been through chemo ourselves. Moore hesitates, agrees to be the watcher. She stands in for us, other viewers, who are not dying.

Had I known what the film was about, I might have avoided it. A dear younger cousin died recently after enduring experimental cancer drug trials. But I didn’t know the plot. The film hadn’t officially opened; I hadn’t seen a trailer; it was an Almodóvar (and I am a theater/ performance critic as well as an age critic). I naively thought it was just about two midlife women friends, played by remarkable actresses. I went in unarmed, as it were — soft-bodied, maybe too emotionally open. This constitutes my trigger warning.

I guessed the subject only when I found my eyes riveted on Tilda Swinton’s protruding neck muscle and gaunt clavicle in the hospital room where she reports her terminal prognosis to her friend Ingrid. How did that cadaverous clavicle not sear my heart? “Did Swinton, born 1960, have to lose so much weight? Is she really ill? Or did the cinematographer cast those shadows?” were thoughts that distracted me from its tragic fictional import. Like a scene from observational cinema, it portended a documentary stance: cool distance from whatever dying from cancer might involve.

There was one brief exception to the emotional chilliness the film maintains: Swinton was directed to overact Martha’s hysterical urgency as she explains to the reluctant Ingrid (Moore was also born in 1960) the horrors that she fears, should Ingrid decide not to help execute her plan. “Cancer can’t get me if I get it first,” she finishes with bravado.

For me, Almodovar succeeded in making this watchable, then and later. That ambivalent success left me able to absorb the film’s qualities and decipher his ambitions. Certainly, it was another master class in making potentially harsh material almost . . . comfortable.

Almodovar is nothing if not stylish. After that overwrought Scene of Persuasion, the movie proceeded with distancing elegance. Real people dying never came into my mind again. Even the sadness was muted. It is Martha, oddly, who utters the elegiac cadences from James Joyce’s “The Dead,” as if she were speaking about the death of a person she doesn’t know. Her sadness came across as posthumous. If this were a psychological film, Martha would be projecting the sorrow she would like someone else — a friend — to convey. Ingrid doesn’t dare show pity, however, because her chosen part, like that of an animal tamer, is to avoid arousing disturbing emotion in Martha, or in the audiences — certainly not agonizing fear.

Almodovar’s habit is artificiality, as he knows so well to do. His gift for extravagant effects evades whatever critiques he is able to anticipate: animation to disguise a rape (Talk To Her), extravagant display to adorn unusual sexualities (almost any early film).

Here, he provides a series of distractions from suspense or pain. Beauty works. Scene after scene provides almost too much to take in visually: cool Mondrian colors, stagey sets (elite architecture, interior design out of Dwell), pensive scenery. Clothing so astonishing women are quoted wanting that sweater. Lipstick, heavily laid on, makes both women clowns. Swinton applies it meticulously just before taking the pill. Acting and embodiments distract: Winton is paperwhite. Julianne Moore is healthy, rosy, even tranquilizing with empathy. John Turturro — the former lover of both women at different times — distracts, by triangulating the women’s pure intimacy. He and Ingrid betray Martha by deciding she will not get the alleviation of his company. His hyperbolic obsession on global warming distracts, by expanding from the case of one private death to the death of the earth. The legal suspense — what will happen to Ingrid, charged as an accomplice to a crime — distracts from the absence of undertakers.

It was only later that I stepped out of the spell of the great director’s magic tricks and was able to think clearly, the way a health advocate or age critic ordinarily thinks.

Almodovar is brave to have laid out one option for choosing how to die: the Death Pill. Audiences can practice imaginatively dealing with their own reactions to that striking decision. “The Room Next Door” is almost an advertisement for bravely taking a pill all alone. Swinton as Martha makes it look easy.

But it’s only one option and not a good one. Getting a pill from an unknown source on “the dark Web,” mentioned gratefully twice, is almost stupidly risky. Like buying opioids on the street that could be laced with baby powder or fentanyl. Is the substance inside the precious pill effective? Noxious? What happens if you don’t die gracefully in a chrome yellow suit, looking sweetly asleep, as the director has Martha look? Instead you wake up, but physically disabled or cognitively impaired. What in the world could any bystander do, confronting that horrifying outcome?

Almodovar chose the US for his first English-language film but seems not to know that Martha could have gone to any one of eleven states that offer medical assistance in dying to people as close to death as she is.

On its face, the film seems to offer much to ponder, concerning end of life in the US. But it closes off important options. One obvious omission is that Ingrid, although reluctant to assist, offers nothing — either in the hospital or later — about palliative care , medical supervision to alleviate pain without foisting unwanted procedures on the dying person. Hospice was brought to the US from Dame Cecily Saunders’ England in 1974. Martha’s pill luckily works, apparently peacefully, in luxurious circumstances. Thus, the film avoids another, glaring, fact that this rich-and-poor nation lacks any system for decent end-of-life care for those with modest financial resources.

This damning public-health failure is excluded, but it drives this scheme of privileged but unworkable euthanasia. It is what drives anyone to fantasies about the Death Pill. And so the film fails us — across the entire country — wherever people demand laws to legalize assisted dying or cannot elect legislatures willing to solve the growing issues of designing Long-Term Care.

The film to watch before or after “The Room Next Door” (or instead) is no fantasy. It is the realist drama, “Everything Went Fine ” (Tout s’est bien passe’, 2021). Discard the irony, it’s a title that works for “The Room Next Door.” Directed by François Ozon and based on a novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim, about a daughter who helps her father die at his persistent, petulant, self-pitying, angry, urgent wish, “Everything Went Fine” is set in France, where lending assistance in dying is a crime punishable by prison and a fine. The film covers many months and many hurdles, and ends in Switzerland. This difficult but well-managed euthanasia also requires money.

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Margaret Morganroth Gullette is a cultural critic and anti-ageism pioneer whose prize-winning work is foundational in critical age studies. She is the author of several books, including Agewise, Aged by Culture, and Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Atlantic, Nation, and the Boston Globe. She is a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis, and lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

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