By Brontë H. Lacsamana, Reporter
Movie Review
The Room Next Door
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
THE melodic absurdity of Pedro Almodóvar’s films is difficult to imagine as being translatable to English, but I am glad to say that the unique beauty of his style of filmmaking manages to shine through in his first English-language feature-length effort, The Room Next Door.
It’s a film that manages to be both gentle and exacting with its tough subject matter. Existential dread permeates the lives of everyone, something Mr. Almodóvar has tackled in many of his works, but never more so than the sudden confrontation of death featured heavily in this latest one.
The Room Next Door follows Ingrid (played by the graceful Julianne Moore), an autofiction novelist whose greatest fear is death. She is thrust into the horrific, unwanted responsibility of being witness to it in real time when her old friend Martha (played by the willowy yet intense Tilda Swinton), a former war reporter now succumbing to cancer, makes an extreme request.
“I would like for you to be in the room next door when I do it,” she asks of Ingrid, referring to her act of euthanasia using illegally acquired pills. (Voluntary euthanasia is not legal in most countries, including the United States.)
What follows is a bleak adventure, told with wickedly dark humor. Both Ms. Moore and Ms. Swinton adopt the distinctly absurd “Almodóvarian” speech patterns — think methodical yet somewhat musical dialogue that people in real life normally wouldn’t use — as they discuss the harshness of euthanasia as a concept. Ms. Swinton’s weakened yet steadfast Martha is straightforward as she pushes towards the finality of death, while Ms. Moore’s nervous Ingrid is deathly frightened as she instinctively pulls back from it.
The oddity of the whole situation and the way the two leads speak suits the story. It boldly presents an unnatural situation set in a heavy-handed depiction of American life and politics, which can take you out of it sometimes. After all, Almodóvar has a European perspective, and his fascination for literature and old films is reflected in the cinematography and the references the characters themselves make — from Edward Hopper and Ingmar Bergman to Buster Keaton and John Huston, among others. All these influences are given new life in a tale that turns out to be exactly about that: people living on through others.
Even candid opinions about how the world is doomed, voiced explicitly by John Turturro’s character Damian, who plays a vital role in both Ingrid and Martha’s lives, match perfectly with the frank treatment of death that they all grow to express. Ms. Moore and Ms. Swinton’s back-and-forth, navigating the uncanny rhythm of eating, conversing, and basking in the sun, is somehow both hilarious and delightful to watch, until it carries them towards the inevitable conclusion.
The existential dread hits hard, the film filled with the connections, regrets, and melancholy that the characters relive and experience over the course of a few weeks. Martha’s deterioration is explored alongside the world’s descent into being unlivable, by the end presenting a picture of moving forward (amid, and despite it all). The meaty chunks of humor injected here and there make the fear of mortality go down — admittedly not totally smoothly, but at least with a strong gulp.
The Room Next Door opens exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas on Feb. 19.
