It may seem surprising, but it’s only now, 40 years into his career, that an imposing figure in European cinema like Pedro Almodóvar – one of the few who can still be called a household name in an era when very few directors from the old continent enjoy such renown – has won his first ever major European festival award: the Golden Lion at the Venice festival, with his first English-language feature, The Room Next Door. In many places, it was wrongly reported that this was his first American film. However, it follows his Cocteau remake The Human Voice (also starring Tilda Swinton, who appears here) and the queer anti-western Strange Way of Life (starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as cowboys and former lovers).

It’s the same old story, so old that it almost makes you sigh at the thought that it still stands: ultimately, it’s a film shot in the lingua franca of the modern world, carried by the performances of two seasoned divas, that manages to bring a global filmmaker a small taste of the recognition he’s enjoyed for so long (see the long list of lifetime achievement awards bestowed on the Madrid-born director).To be fair, there is something about The Room Next Door that makes it accessible to a wider audience, beyond the language aspect – it combines the scandalous nature of his early work, the deep autobiographical melancholy of Pain and Glory, and a fiery protagonist who takes on the world and rebels against patriarchy, as in Volver or Parallel Mothers. But perhaps the most accessible aspect is its central theme: the end of life and how we choose to relate to it, whether we witness it or are its protagonists.

In a nutshell, the film, which is adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, follows two old friends, Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton) – who we never learn how they met, or what connects them beyond the vexing situation they find themselves in – who are reunited by their relationship to death. Ingrid is a Joan Didion-like writer who has just released an essayistic book  about her deep fear of other people’s deaths; Martha is a former war photographer who, after spending so many years witnessing the deaths of others, sacrificing her personal life for her profession, must face her own. After learning that the experimental treatment she has been undergoing for cancer has failed, Martha decides to end her life before the pain and gradual degradation of her body fully take over her mind. Through a wider chain of circumstances, Ingrid becomes the one who agrees to accompany Martha on the final stretch of her life, confronting her own fundamental fear along with her friend’s emotional rollercoaster, as well as the possibility of legal trouble for doing so.

Of course, the topic of assisted suicide is an extremely sensitive and ever-evolving issue – technologically, legally, and philosophically (including in terms of its portrayal) – around the world. (For instance, see this excellent essay by Emil Vasilache for Iscoada – which is available in Romanian, but I’d highly recommend passing it through Google Translate.) It’s clear that Almodóvar is in the pro-assisted suicide camp, and the film serves this belief: that every individual has the right to end their life with dignity, to decide to end their physical suffering. Throughout the film, he slips in his views through the characters’ lines, such as the moment when John Turturro’s character states that the climate apocalypse is the result of the rise of the far-right and neoliberal capitalism. But here and there, between more or less successful flashbacks of Martha’s life and more or less emphatic conversations on the film’s central theme, things seem quite “simple”. As cinema masterpieces have shown us (from Taste of Cherry to The Virgin Suicides), or as major literary works on suicide (The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus) have demonstrated, the subject becomes truly fascinating when we delve into far more complex, tangled, problematic, or obscure motivations.

It often feels as if the main motivation of the old enfant terrible of Spanish cinema is to dress his actresses in absolutely splendid outfits – and I see nothing wrong with that, quite the contrary. Still, I can’t help noticing a vague inadequacy here. But that’s not even the biggest issue with this new attempt at a Sirkian psychodrama – otherwise noble in its thematic goals, with a reasonably solid script considering the conventions of melodrama (which always require some degree of ridiculous and improbable, something Almodóvar managed very well in Parallel Mothers). The bigger problem, so big that it seems to swallow the entire screen with an insatiable hunger, is Tilda Swinton.

“What? Tilda Swinton?!”, you might ask. Sure, the Tildamania that has taken over middlebrow cinephiles in the last decade – too finicky to consume “conventional” dramas, too safe to look beyond traditional narrative formulas – makes us believe that such a thing is impossible. (Listen, I’m not a critic who focuses on the idea of ​​”good or bad acting”;  things have to be glaringly obvious for me to notice.) But Derek Jarman’s muse fails to adapt to her screen partner. Throughout the whole film, she acts as if she were on stage at a London theatre, as if she’s always in the middle of a soliloquy, always announcing her character’s grand tragedy as if the stage lights were focused solely on her. (As someone recently said, in the last ten years, Tilda Swinton’s presence in a film by an established director almost feels like a somewhat desperate gesture, an unconscious sign of artistic crisis or a dead end.)

Nothing new, of course – Swinton’s moments of mastery, both in The Room Next Door and throughout her career, have often been those that demanded her physicality, her almost unnatural movements, her peculiar, searching gaze as she moves through a scene, rather than when she has to “deliver lines”. But that becomes blatant, even painfully obvious, when this self-centred style of acting is paired with the radically opposite style of Julianne Moore, who (at least for me) may be the greatest actress in American cinema. She embodies a certain contradictory femininity that has been sublimated into a major archetype since the 1950s (and the decade’s conception of traditional roles). There’s something that always devastates me in the way her face reveals an enormous inner turmoil beneath a shy, forced smile, the way she portrays the constant emotional suppression that women must perform in society, the difficulty of holding oneself back, the terrible desire to offer love at the expense of one’s own well-being – whereas Swinton’s statue-like performance couldn’t be more different and inappropriate when put next to this one.

It’s hard for me to give a verdict, a recommendation. It feels almost cruel, given all the circumstances surrounding this film: neither bad nor offensive, neither good nor revelatory – it brushes too closely to the vast, overwhelming land of „in the middle”. In the dual key of fear and desire for death, that may very well be the most unfortunate outcome possible.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.