The latest film from Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar deals with terminal disease and the painful decision to depart this life with dignity and on one’s own terms. It’s about the enduring bonds of a lifelong friendship, the celebration of memories and making peace with regrets. In Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, it boasts two of the finest actors currently working. It should be the kind of mascara-streaming weepy that tears out your heart and stomps it into tiny, aching fragments. And yet The Room Next Door, which won the Golden Lion at Venice last month, feels emotionally empty – a cool void of a film stripped bare of the warmth, quirks and conversational shorthand that make a real friendship feel vital and lived in.
It isn’t an unpleasant way to spend a couple of hours, but then neither is leafing through a copy of Elle Decoration. And the rewards are remarkably similar. See The Room Next Door for its stunning mid-century architecture, chic interior design, and for Swinton’s enviable euthanasia wardrobe. But don’t expect to feel much of anything, unless you have an unhealthy passion for colour-blocked chunky knitwear.
Swinton plays Martha, a former war correspondent who is living with cancer. By chance, novelist Ingrid (Moore), a friend from the past, learns of Martha’s diagnosis and rekindles their long-dormant relationship. The bond between them is stronger than ever. Or so we are told. In practice, Almodóvar’s unease in directing his first English-language film is painfully obvious. Both central performances are uncomfortably mannered; the lines of dialogue are declaimed rather than lived, their clipped artificiality constantly jolting us out of the story.