Fleapit revisited:The Room Next Door.

"The snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead" - The Dead, James Joyce

When successful author Ingrid (Julianne Moore) reconnects with her old friend and war correspondent Martha (Tilda Swinton) it's apparent from the off that Martha is ill. She's got cervical cancer and even though the new treatment programme she's undergoing is, for the most part, working, Martha knows it's merely buying her time. She's come not just to accept, but to embrace, the end of her life but she is quite clear that she doesn't want to suffer, or deteriorate, any more than she has to.

So she asks Ingrid for a very big favour. She asks Ingrid to go away with her to upstate New York, somewhere near Woodstock - somewhere very beautiful - but somewhere with no memories for Martha, and be with her while she waits for the right time to take her own life with a euthanasia pill she has illegally bought on the dark web. She doesn't need Ingrid to hold her hand or even to be in the room with her when she does it. She needs Ingrid to be in the property, in the next room. Martha doesn't want to die alone.

The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodovar's first English language film, based on Sigrid Nunez's novel What Are You Going Through, sees the Spanish director in more sombre, more reflective, and less camp mood than admirers of his previous work may expect. Could it be that Almodovar, at the age of seventy-five, is beginning to consider his own mortality and that of those around him?

The film is emotional and yet warm at the same time, it's chilling at times but it's also tender while retaining what Graham Greene once called 'that splinter of ice in the heart'. The friendship between Ingrid and Martha is close, loving, and respectful but while Martha is open to Ingrid about her intentions and feelings, Ingrid - the author of fiction and thus, presumably, more prone to confection - keeps some things from Martha.

Not least the fact she is still in touch with Damien Cunningham (John Turturro) - a former partner of both women. Damien is kind and understanding yet rages with absolute, and understandable, nihilism at the climate crisis, at neoliberalism, and at the rise of the far right. All of which he believes will conspire to bring about the end of human life on the planet. 

Damien, like Ingrid and Martha, is a writer and the film is never shy of veering into literary or artistic waters. The friends discuss Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Edward Hopper, Leonora Carrington, Dora Carrington, and Lytton Strachey as they look at either the beautiful Catskill adjacent forests or the incredible New York skyline.

There are good performances from Turtutto, Alessandro Nivola as a local police officer, Alex Hogh Andersen as the father of Martha's daughter Michelle (played by Swinton herself as an older woman), and Esther McGregor (Ewan's daughter) as the young Martha but, of course, The Room Next Door is really a double header and Moore and Swinton are both excellent. Neither of them off the screen for very long at any one time.

The dialogue (it's a dialogue heavy film) is brilliant, it's fascinating even it is perhaps almost too perfectly articulated and delivered to represent real human conversation, and as with the TV programme Mayflies (shown a couple of years back) we're left ponder issues of euthanasia (rather than suicide), assisted dying, death with dignity, and how we come to terms with our own mortality and the mortality of those we are closest too. We'll all have to face these things one day. It's remarkable how little serious forethought and preparation we put into it. The Room Next Door will help prime you for the inevitable and though you may shed a tear, you'll feel better for it afterwards.

Thanks to Sanda for getting me in for free on her Odeon card and, even more so, for joining me in watching this film.