A woman is dying and asks her friend for a favor. “What is it?” the friend asks. “I’m going to kill myself,” the woman says. “And I want you to be in the room next door when I do.”
That might make The Room Next Door, the latest from legendary Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, sound like a tantalizing premise, and it is, but not in the way you’d expect.
One of the great makers of melodramas, Almodóvar knows how to take something simple and suffuse it with enough heightened emotions and moral uncertainty that you can’t help but get swept up. He’s a modern-day Alfred Hitchcock: someone who can take beautiful and wealthy people living beautiful and wealthy lives and make them feel so common that when the conflict appears, you wonder what you would do in their shoes.
But here’s the trick of The Room Next Door, and it’s a hurdle you might have to get past: It’s all so hokey.
I’ll explain. In the first 30 minutes, the terminal woman, Martha (Tilda Swinton), explains her plight — ovarian cancer — and the backstory of a one-time lover to her friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore). But she narrates with such detachment that you can’t believe Swinton is capable of giving a performance this bland. Ditto for Moore, whose line readings have all the subtlety of community theater.
But the owls are not what they seem. When Martha tells the story of her one-time lover’s demise, we see in flashback the man (Alex Høgh Andersen), a Vietnam vet suffering from severe PTSD, driving by a burning farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. He stops the vehicle and races inside to save the voices crying for help. But there are no voices, and no one is inside. The grass growing up to the front steps of the burning house isn’t even matted down in a way that indicates someone or something has ever been there. Curiouser and curiouser.
Almodóvar knows what he’s doing. The Room Next Door is a sneaky little treatise on death and dying, right to die, climate change, futility, optimism, moral complicity and more things than I have space to go into here. It’s the kind of story that would come off as flat and boring and probably pretentious if the storyteller didn’t tell it well. But Almodóvar does. And it works.
ON SCREEN: The Room Next Door opens in theaters Jan. 10.