The Room Next Door

Aided by sumptuous cinematography (Eduard Grau), a haunting score (Alberto Iglesias) and eye-popping production design (Inbal Weinberg) – there’s always a font of interior decorating ideas in an Almodóvar film – Martha’s journey toward the great unknown has everything but a light at the end of the tunnel.

Even with its preoccupation with death, The Room Next Door is not a dour film. In fact, it’s rather optimistic, celebrating the beauties of life and meaningful connection in the face of death with a thoughtful, pensive tone.

The film is not aiming to depress its audience, though. It is instead cathartic and energizing to witness these dire topics chewed over and spun into delicate poetry. It’s an act of communion, really, Almodóvar drawing us in close to say that yes, yes he shares our same doleful worry.

What absolutely, undoubtedly does work is Moore and Swinton together. If some of the more melodramatic or crime-movie flourishes feel forced, the central relationship of “The Room Next Door” is consistently provocative.

If the three main draws are too confirmed in respective talents to deliver a subpar performance or a slipshod composition, their shared billing can never quite deliver this film from listlessness.

Given Almodóvar’s established penchant for melodrama and that the subject is euthanasia, the film is strangely aloof. It never reduces the proceedings to Lifetime territory or patronizes moviegoers in the process. It does, however, leave you to wonder a bit about the indifference you might ultimately come away with yourself.

Such an important and tender subject as assisted suicide deserves more than this mawkish, soapish nonsense.

El primer experimento de Almodóvar en idioma extranjero cumple con todo. Apoyado con las memorables actuaciones de Swinton y Moore, supo cómo disertar un tema espinoso como la eutanasia evitando la controversia y tocar una fibra sensible en el espectador. De lo de este año, de aquellas que merecen ser guardadas en una boveda.

Una bellísima reflexión sobre la muerte y nuestro tiempo. Va de los micro a lo macro y realmente te golpea. El único punto bajo es que resulta extremadamente expositivo en varios tramos.

In 'The Room Next Door', Pedro Almodóvar meditates on our relationship with death and puts the topic of euthanasia on the table. Through the unconventional but extremely profound bond between two mature women who face a situation as beautiful as it is extreme, the Spaniard expresses his feelings about assisted death and looks forward to the role it will play in an increasingly bleak future for our species. His collaboration with Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton was only natural, as they both project a discourse that moves between fatalism and longing with passion and subtlety. Their looks and creative force screamed for starring roles in an Almodovar movie, and he makes the most of it giving them incredible material to work with (and the best outfits too, of course). A truly deserving Golden Lion film that asks the most pertinent questions about the right to die in a rapidly dehumanized world.

"The Room Next Door" is a slightly entertaining first English-language attempt from Pedro Almodóvar but the its tone doesn't quite mesh with the difficult subject matter. The topic is assisted suicide in cancer but these characters feel very one dimensional and times it's very unserious with the way it's written and the way it's acted. The complex narratives are filled with heartbreaking choices, visuals saturated with colour, and the rendering of women’s inner lives aren't very much intact. Ingrid (Oscar winner Julianne Moore) is a bestselling author so famously afraid of death she has written a book about it. When she learns that Martha (Oscar winner Tilda Swinton) — a former war correspondent — is ill, she visits her, reigniting a friendship from years past, when both were journalists. Martha is fighting another war now, and the rekindled closeness between the women means Ingrid is drawn into her treatments as stories are told, secrets are revealed, and regret, redemption, and mortality are discussed over tea. One day, Martha asks Ingrid for the one thing she is most hesitant to give. The way they negotiate life’s deepest choices is what makes the film so memorable but on the surface level the way it's very nonchalant doesn't give the film much of an emotional impact.

(Mauro Lanari) Lacquered and glossy, with the regulation dress code for high-profile festival events. I spot no difference between this film and Haneke's untouchable "Amour" (2012): approaching the end of life by the jet-set, the upper bourgeoisie, and the socio-economic-cultural elite. Almodóvar had shown since '87 ("La ley del deseo") that he knew how to deal with Eros and Thanatos at the same time, but with a disruptive approach both in his anticonventional stylistic cut and within the context of the Movida. Here he talks about it from a senile and erudite position, "elegant and artificial" (Simone Emiliani), cloaked in the snowy mantle of artistic classics in which he yearns to be included