The Room Next Door Could Change Your Mind About Euthanasia
Bold as always, Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar elegantly tackles the touchiest of subjects for his first English-language feature.
good.film
3 months ago
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The Room Next Door releases in Australian cinemas on Thursday, December 26.
There’s perhaps only a handful of filmmakers whose work immediately springs to mind when you hear a single name: Kubrick. Scorsese. Campion. And… Almodóvar. Over a five-decade career, acclaimed Spanish writer-director Pedro Almodóvar has blended humour, tragedy, and desire (ah, the classics) along with piercing emotional insights, then painted them all in vivid colourways across the silver screen.
If you’re someone who vibes the vibrant stuff in life, you’ve probably already been drawn to his bold and dazzling work like a moth to a bright red flame. But there’s one thing he’s never done, until now: write and direct a feature film in the English language. And Pedro hasn’t gone easy on himself for this, his first attempt.
The Room Next Door peels back the very layered onion of the right-to-die movement with an emotional heartbeat that’s truly rewarding to watch. After our work supporting the end-of-life documentary The Last Ecstatic Days, we were primed to explore the questions raised by its fictional twin, adapted by Pedro from Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel, What Are You Going Through.
It’s strong, yet wonderfully nuanced; it features two sublime actresses at the very top of their game; and – dare we say it – this so-called tragic drama even has its laugh out loud moments. So how did he pull it off? And, apart from the Almodóvar touch, what gives The Room Next Door a different voice to other euthanasia stories we’ve seen on the big screen?
The film has a lyrical quality, and no wonder: Ingrid (played by Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton) are both writers. They were close, years ago, when they worked at the same magazine; but life and work and lovers drifted them apart, and they haven’t been in touch for a decade or more. That’s until Martha reaches out, creating what the film’s own synopsis describes as an “extreme but strangely sweet situation”.
She’s dying – terminal cervical cancer that’s spread to her liver and bones – and she’s determined to go out on her terms. She’s angry; not that she’s dying, but that she always took such good care of her health, and now at 60, she won’t make her next birthday. Yeah, we’d be furious too. Almodóvar gets any false hope out of the way early: Martha won’t be surviving this story. She knows it, and so do we. And she absolutely refuses to wallow in self-pity.
But she does have one request. As a former war reporter, Martha admits she’s faced death before, but she wasn't alone: her fellow reporters formed a kind of mobile family. And like those days, she doesn’t want to be alone again now. She’s booked an Airbnb retreat and arranged a blackmarket euthanasia pill – will Ingrid join her and support her while she takes her own life, on the day she feels is right? “I’m not a stoic, Ingrid. I’m asking you to be in the next room.”
It’s a startling final wish. Would you say yes? Ingrid’s effectively our eyes in this story, and we’re asked to weigh up her choices, not Martha’s. As a companion, Ingrid’s compassion and level-headedness are obvious. She seems the perfect choice for Martha to have reached out to. Even if she does feel awkward taking the place of the first person you’d think of for end-of-life care: Martha’s own daughter.
But ‘family’ often takes on different meaning in Almodóvar’s stories. A close friend from years past provides far closer comfort than Martha’s own flesh and blood. She explains that they’re estranged; she was a teenager when she gave birth. Martha even admits that they felt so little emotion for each other, she fantasized that her daughter was switched at birth. It’s a stark insight. Does she wish for a closer bond with her child, now that she’s facing her death?
Almodóvar devotes a good early chunk of The Room Next Door to flashbacks that fill in Martha’s emotional backstory. A tragedy that killed her lover, and closed off her capacity for reciprocal love. Her work as a reporter in Baghdad that ensured she was away for months at a time. We sense that these things not only drove a wedge between Martha and her daughter, but that she let them. “By the end, there was nothing left.”
It takes an honest filmmaker to give us a lead character who’s so frank about her feelings (in the past, the ‘bad mother’ trope was an instant shortcut to an unlikeable antagonist). Martha isn’t necessarily cold-hearted though; just matter of fact. She admits to Ingrid that she’s never been able to access fantasy – to “make stuff up as an author, like you do.” With a grin, Ingrid shoots back “Well I hope not, you’re a war reporter!”
It’s not the film’s only pop of humour. They laugh together over a shared lover from their past (“I never had any complaints!”); later, Ingrid meets a hilariously earnest personal trainer who stares at her in confused European as she quotes a poem about death. It’s one of the film’s funniest scenes, but Martha isn’t there to see it – she waved off the invitation. Hey, if we were planning to take a euthanasia pill, we’d skip the gym too.
When Ingrid joins Martha at the quiet, forested retreat she’s chosen to end her life, The Room Next Door really starts to explore the women’s unspoken doubts and desires that fuel this story. If this were another drama (or a Hollywood weepie), you might expect Ingrid to plead with Martha to reconsider. Instead, Almodóvar introduces far more interesting thought bubbles.
Like Martha’s career background. Part of her emotional survival as a war journalist was to block out her feelings and stay in the present – so in her “war” against cancer, is she doing the same? Ingrid urges Martha to at least write about her experience, or reconnect with her daughter, but has Martha suppressed her emotions for so long, she can’t access them?
Almodóvar then plants seeds of doubt about Martha’s self-proclaimed “readiness to leave”, like the scene where she realises she’s forgotten to bring the (difficult to obtain) euthanasia pill with her. She blames her “chemo brain”, but was it truly forgetfulness? Or subconsciously, is her time with Ingrid – and chats about her daughter and her impressive career – bringing a fresh perspective to her decision?
As we hinted earlier, there’s also anger. Martha talks about cancer always being seen and portrayed as a “fight”, so what if you lose that fight? Does that mean you didn't “fight” hard enough? How dare anyone label her as a defeatist! Martha’s definitely someone who rejects any kind of pandering – and in her opinion, “some of the worst stuff” comes from the cancer support community, who “see it as a gift. Bullshit! Cancer can't get me if I get it first.”
As the women spend longer together, and Martha’s still-to-be-decided final day draws closer, The Room Next Door’s tension ratchets up. When they begin to have minor disagreements, it feels like small scabs being picked off a much bigger wound. There’s a shadow living with them – an elephant in the room next door, lying in wait to land a crushing blow.
Martha is adamant that she doesn’t want to experience excruciating pain for no good reason. She can’t think straight, can't concentrate, can't read her favourite writers. As she puts it, all of her pleasures have been reduced. “I’m ready to leave, and I think I deserve a good death… to go out with a little bit of dignity.” And while that’s true, is it fair, what she’s asked of Ingrid? Has Martha given enough consideration to what her friend will go through when she checks “the room next door” and discovers that Ingrid is no longer alive?
With his expert sensibility, Almodóvar actually lets us preview this: one morning, Ingrid finds Martha’s bedroom silent and door closed. She sobs on the balcony at the loss of her friend… only to jump out of her skin when Martha sidles up and asks her what’s wrong? It’s genuinely funny, and welcome comic relief, but it serves another purpose: now Martha has seen with her own eyes the effect that her taking her own life will have on others.
This gets to the film’s knotty emotional core, because of course, Martha’s choice is going to affect Ingrid in profound ways. Losing her memory, Martha admits that she can’t trust her judgement anymore, leading Ingrid to gently ask her “Then how do you trust this decision?” When Martha says she’d rather not discuss it, Ingrid replies “But it's my business too, don't you think?”
Don’t forget, this is America. Ingrid’s lack of action in preventing Martha’s self-administered euthanasia has genuine legal consequences. She’s complicit in this “suicide attempt”; in the hands of a fiery prosecutor it could even be twisted into manslaughter. And while Martha’s thought of this – and together, they’ve worked on a cover story – they might just have underestimated the long arm of the law.
In this way, The Room Next Door’s final act is a thought-provoking look at the right to die, and the uneasy ways this moral argument grinds its cogs alongside the laws we’ve created. Ingrid selflessly supported a friend, yet she finds herself interrogated by local police and involving her lawyer. She’s made to feel like a criminal – and yes, Ingrid did commit a felony. What Almodóvar is asking, though, is did Ingrid do anything wrong?
There’s one final little thinking point: we learn that Ingrid is a writer of autofiction, a genre that combines autobiography with exaggerated or entirely fictional elements. They’re works that blur the line between a strictly truthful first-person account, and something more heightened. So, are we seeing the true version of Martha’s final days? Or could The Room Next Door be a cheeky dramatisation, elevated through Ingrid’s eyes? Now THAT would be oh-so-Almodóvar.
With its gentle quality, it’s hard not to take The Room Next Door home with you. It may be his first English feature, but all of Almodóvar’s renowned fingerprints are there: the strong colours, a riveting central dilemma and of course, a Salt Bae sprinkling of melodrama (plus there’s a pivotal casting choice at the end that only Pedro, and every soap opera ever, could get away with).
It’s beautiful, but doesn’t pull punches. Doesn’t sugarcoat. It’s real. Martha’s response to the rhetoric of “fighting” cancer is a bold reframe that anyone who’s sick – and sick of empty platitudes from people who “mean well” – will applaud. And the late aspect of criminality that creeps over the story is something that’s only going to get more relevant as the right to die debate progresses globally.
One of the film’s great assets is that it feels unrushed – ironic, for a story about someone’s dying days. While Martha & Ingrid soak in and appreciate the small, wonderful things that their time together allows them, so do we. The sweeping hush of the forest. The beauty of the birdsong. The chunky paintings on the walls. There’s a tactile, peaceful quality to the film that most of us, in our daily whirlwinds, don’t have the time to notice, much less let in.
The Room Next Door gives you two hours to let the beauty in. Martha seems entirely at peace – she’s ready to die, almost impatient to die, as she puts it. Almodóvar puts to us the question, if Martha’s ready, who is anyone to stop her? Yes, it’s a death-affirming story. And yet by probing the delicacy of our short lifespans – time spent writing about warfare, and painting, and breathing mountain air, and making love – it’s also a deeply life-affirming one.
Catch The Room Next Door in cinemas from Thursday, December 26.
