Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore, and Tilda Swinton Sound a Little Off in The Room Next Door

Would The Room Next Door play better starring Penélope Cruz? Maybe not; Cruz isn’t quite in the age range of the movie’s actual stars, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, and it’s not as if either actress is miscast in the movie. (If it’s even possible to miscast either of them at all, it hasn’t happened here.) But there’s something about this intimate drama that feels not quite properly translated, less in the literal language than in the picture’s overall feel – something Cruz might have smoothed over through her long-term creative partnership with writer-director Pedro Almodóvar. In Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, following a couple of short subjects (one of which starred Swinton), Moore plays Ingrid, an author who reconnects with her once-close friend Martha (Swinton) just as Martha reels from a bad turn in her fight against cancer. That very language – describing people as warriors “fighting” a “battle” with cancer that may be won or lost – rankles the prickly but even-keeled Martha, and once she gets the bad news, she formulates a different strategy. She will procure a pill to end her own life, and asks for Ingrid’s help in doing so.

Martha doesn’t need assistance getting the pill – “on the dark web you can find almost anything,” she blithely explains in one of many lines of dialogue that raises questions about Almodóvar’s satirical intent or lack thereof – or any other logistics, really. She simply wants Ingrid to serve as the person in the “room next door” to hers when she embarks on her final exit. They will spend time together in a rented house, preparing, and when Ingrid finds the door to Martha’s bedroom closed, she will know what has happened. Ingrid, whose recent book attempts to confront her own fear of death, reluctantly agrees to this plan, moved by her friend’s desire to wrest back control of her body after months of medical treatments.

The Room Next Door, based on Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, is a talky, meditative drama, consisting largely of conversations between Martha and Ingrid. Some of them are practical, as Martha advises Ingrid on how to avoid trouble from the police after she dies – assisting her is, after all, considered some form of crime. Some of them speak to the pain and uncertainty of living in the final phase of our lives, especially when it comes earlier than we were expecting. And others, a fair number at that, have the stilted rhythms of non-comedic Woody Allen, where characters awkwardly remind each other of the backstories their characters are supposed to mostly know already.

Would some of this “sound” better in subtitled Spanish, with the obvious implication that any clunkiness comes from translation? Maybe, but I’m not so sure, because regardless of wording, many of these scenes feel like Almodóvar is imposing melodrama on a delicate, elegiac story. Martha had a daughter, now-middle-aged and largely estranged, when she was a teenager, with a father who wasn’t involved in their lives. The flashbacks detailing this relationship are dramatically fruitful, but they quickly overripen to near-parodic levels, as when teenage Martha opens her door to find her PTSD-suffering Vietnam-vet beau, freshly returned from war and cued to look so immediately stricken that it’s hard to stifle a laugh at the shorthand – repeatedly offered to the audience, and often denied to the characters who explain themselves too clearly, too explicitly. The father of Martha’s daughter, for example, helpfully offers that he’s still got the war running inside his head, a bad coming-home narrative distilled to its hacky essence.

Look, Almodóvar is a brilliant guy. Plenty of his movies utilize melodramatic embellishments to greater ends. Here, though, stated-not-felt emotions compete with richer observations: “There are lots of ways to live inside a tragedy.” “You can’t be self-possessed if you’re in agony.” Do these really deserve to bump up against “you can find almost anything on the dark web”? With his careful attention to the controlled emoting from both Swinton and Moore, so free of showy tearjerking or breakdowns, Almodóvar humanely and pointedly avoids turning The Room Next Door into an issue movie dedicated to assisted suicide. Then the movie backs into feeling like one anyway.

The Room Next Door doesn’t look as uncanny as Parallel Mothers, the previous Almodóvar feature, which sometimes radiated a harsh overbrightness, like he was finding a new way into the artifice of digital. This one has a more standard, largely undistracting digital crispness. But as Ingrid and Martha head upstate to let the peace of nature into Martha’s last days, the movie looks overly manicured for such a messy subject – it’s doing the tidying that the lead performances have already sorted, through their restraint. Is this a comment on the moneyed curation Martha is attempting to impose on her experience (amusingly undercut when Ingrid heads off to the gym near their bucolic lake-house rental)? At a New York Film Festival press conference, Almodóvar responded to a perceptive question about the characters’ unspoken privilege by eloquently discussing the heightened reality that he often works in, so it seems like the answer is no.

It seems possible, then, that others will see a more poetic movie in The Room Next Door, something that more consistently matches the level of its best moments, including a lovely, reflective ending. I saw an Almodóvar movie that seemed uncertain about whether or how to abandon some of those heightened moments from earlier in his career, instead occupying a strange middle ground.

Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Writer: Pedro Almodóvar
Starring: Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, John Turturro, Alessandro Nivola
Release date: October 4, 2024 (New York Film Festival); December 20, 2024 (select theaters)

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on Twitter under the handle @rockmarooned.