“Late style” is probably only a selling point amidst a specific type of cinephile, but it is for those I declare – The Room Next Door bring Pedro Almodóvar, the revered 75-year-old Spanish filmmaker, at long last to his late style. Characterized by long takes with minimal camera movement, direct dialogue and line readings, openness to acting choices that seem like they could bounce off the film’s style, and a patience to draw the film’s emotion from the gaps between the drama more than the drama itself, “late style” is antithetical to not only the accepted notions of commercial cinema, but the typical impressions of what presents itself as “good directing.”
Whether this inclination happened naturally – “late style” is termed that for a reason – or is the result of this being Almodóvar’s first feature in English (he previously made two half-hour shorts), naturally I could not say. The film’s preoccupation with death is nothing new for him, of course. His films are littered both with corpses and the appearance of them, and the specter of AIDS has hung over his work throughout his career. Characters are often confronted with their corporeal nature, the unknown expiration date hanging over them, and daring it to draw nearer still.
Martha (Tilda Swinton), then, is not such new vessel. An accomplished journalist who’s risked death hundreds of times, she now has less use for actually living. She’s done her rounds of chemotherapy and treatment, but her latest cancer recurrence is all she can bear, and only on her terms. She has no date in mind, but a rented house for a month and the certainty she will know when the moment is right.
Ingrid (Julianne Moore) was not her first call. There are others who are closer to her. But they were close once, when they were young, a particular bond that has no corollary, and chance has recently reconnected them. So when Martha decides to end her life, and acquires the pills necessary to do so, Ingrid becomes the only one she can ask, not for assistance, but simply to be there the next morning; in the room next door.
Ingrid, however, is the antithesis of Martha, and perhaps of Almodóvar if my theory of his death motif holds water. Ingrid is terrified of dying, and of being near death. She doesn’t agree easily, or comfortably. Their time together at the rented house is characterized as much by their bond as by their fundamental misunderstanding of one another. Longtime friendships are like that. There are parts of one another we discuss, dissect, joke about, argue over, and ultimately never really resolve. Ingrid is not particularly different by the end of this journey; her change is molecular, and draws more from the knowledge that one can go through something than that something can be gained from it.
Moore has always had a knack for anxious attachment to oneself, the tension that comes from the body becoming disconnected from the mind, and being unable to rationalize or even understand your own choices. The central tension of the film is both there on the surface – any morning, Ingrid may wake up to find Martha dead – and in every breath she takes. She toys with trying to talk Martha out of it; we so often seek to change what doesn’t make sense to us. Moore is brilliant at conveying a calm, measured tone and all the effort it takes her characters to bring that out. When everything in them is screaming for release. Yet to be there for a friend, to truly give yourself over to someone, is such a gift.
Swinton is one of cinema’s pure geniuses, a wholly original and limitless voice. She immediately conveys an appropriate presence. Martha is slightly intimidating, both for her life’s work and for her certainty in facing death. Tilda Swinton is more than slightly intimidating. Even Martha’s ordinary humanity, the small mistakes and occasional forgetfulness she displays, feels in Swinton’s expression a divine comfort. She is the opposite of Ingrid in her centeredness; she seems already to have touched the afterlife and knows what awaits. Occasionally she’ll enter a room and seem already a spirit. Yet Swinton doesn’t rest on this part of herself. She sees how Martha’s sureness transforms into stubbornness, her stubbornness into an inability to fully account for a life and all the regrets and incomplete relationships you leave behind. She accepts this fact maybe too easily. It comes, perhaps, with a lifetime spent risking it.
And so we come back to Almodóvar, and late style. Like so many great artists, he has spent his career in risk. Often at odds with his country (even as recently as 2021, Parallel Mothers confronted Spain’s difficulty addressing its civil war), and portraying what some may (and have) deemed “deviant” sexuality, his early career especially is marked by reckless extravagance. Even once he solidified his cultural respectability with All About My Mother, he continued to test the boundaries of good taste and acceptable subject matter, a relentless pursuit of his own passions he tried to come to terms with in fiction with Pain and Glory, his most directly autobiographical film. That gave him the opportunity to directly reflect on his life and career; The Room Next Door synthesizes that self-understanding into its texture, reaching with Martha a point beyond self-acceptance into a kind of actualization, no longer concerned with pushing boundaries and instead settling into the new frontier he has built. There is not a second of the film that could be described as anything less than masterfully told, nor many sequences as immediately grandiose as much of his earlier work. When his form announces itself, it is through a whisper that sends a shiver down your spine; a suggestion that takes its root in your soul and blossoms over hours, weeks, years.
So much of the minute-to-minute pleasure rests in simplicity; the tone of the actors’ voices, the pleasure of the color palette (Almodóvar is never one to disappoint there), the calm sensation of settling into an evening. It is permeated both with the anxiety of life – Ingrid’s former lover, Damian (John Turturro), lives in quiet terror over the inevitability of climate change – as a contrast to its central pleasure, to the ways we find ways to rest underneath the spectacular waves threatening to subsume us. It is a mature work, and a great one.
