The Room Next Door review: 'Almodóvar cracks his characters open like piñatas'

Starring Tilda Swinton as a terminally ill woman seeking to end her life, The Room Next Door sees director Pedro Almodóvar tease out intriguing ideas about the need for defiance in the face of tragedy, writes Alistair Harkness
Warner BrosWarner Bros
Warner Bros | Warner Bros

The Room Next Door (12A) ★★★

Blitz (12A) ★★

The Front Room (15) ★★

Following his recent high-profile English-language short films The Human Voice and Strange Way of Life, Spanish master Pedro Almodóvar returns with his first full-length feature in English, The Room Next Door, a stilted-at-first melodrama that gradually finds some of the familiar rhythms that allow him to crack his characters open like piñatas. The latter comes as a relief, not least because the airless opening scenes have the feel of a bad play, full of clunky, expository dialogue that not even stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore seem able to navigate effectively. 

Cast as former friends and colleagues whose divergent career paths have caused them to drift apart in the decades since they worked for a magazine in 1980s New York, neither Swinton’s battle-hardened war photographer Martha nor Moore’s best-selling essayist Ingrid seem particularly comfortable. Not that they’re supposed to: Martha has stage-three cervical cancer and Ingrid has only just found out from a mutual friend. But even taking into consideration Almodóvar’s penchant for soapy melodrama, their respective line readings initially have the ring of a satnav translating foreign street names into English: they get the story where it needs to go, but none of it sounds quite right.

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Eventually, though, Almodóvar’s script stops telegraphing his character’s interior lives and lets Swinton and Moore start connecting on a deeper level. When Martha opts to forgo further treatment and sources a euthanasia pill on the dark web, her request for Ingrid to help her end her life sends the film into darker territory as they retreat to a luxury woodland holiday rental in upstate New York in the full knowledge that, on any given day, Ingrid might not only find Martha dead, but might then be on the hook with the cops for helping her. 

Given Martha could have relocated to Oregon, where assisted dying is legal, this twist can seem a little contrived, a way to artificially ratchet up the tension late on via a suspicious police officer (Alessandro Nivola) who wears his faith on his sleeve. Yet it’s worth it to see Moore trying to hold things together as Ingrid attempts to make Martha’s last days as meaningful as possible. It’s worth it, too, to see Swinton’s initially baffling performance come into its own. Because Martha has spent much of her professional life amid the adrenalised chaos of various war zones, staring death in the face is the most natural thing in the world for her, yet doing so in the relative tranquility of her civilian life has thrown her for a loop.

Literary and cinematic allusions to James Joyce’s The Dead, along with John Torturro’s arrival as a misanthropic climate change lecturer who’s dated both women, allow Almodóvar to tease out intriguing ideas about the need for defiance in the face of tragedy — something he reinforces with both his use of colour and his sumptuous production design (the aforementioned woodland retreat could give the Parasite house an inferiority complex). These signature flashes of flamboyance tell us much about the characters. Unlike his stiff dialogue, nothing gets lost in translation. 

Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan and Paul Weller in BlitzSaoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan and Paul Weller in Blitz
Saoirse Ronan, Elliott Heffernan and Paul Weller in Blitz | Apple

Steve McQueen’s new World War Two film Blitz plays like a movie at war with itself. Revolving around George (Elliott Heffernan), a mixed-race London evacuee trying to get back to his mother (Saoirse Ronan), McQueen fills it with expressionistic touches that recall the nightmarish child’s eye perspective that Elem Klimov’s Come and See and Václav Marhoul’s more recent The Painted Bird brought to the same conflict.

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But these moments are only fleeting in a film that veers between frustratingly trad Brit flick conventions about salt-of-the-earth Londoners in wartime and a more diverse view of life on the home front, one that acknowledges the racism, anti-semitism and criminality that was also rife, but does so with speechifying characters that make it feel more like a civics lesson than a drama. 

When it does focus on the drama of its young protagonist, it’s similarly uneven. George’s early scenes with fellow evacuees have the feel of The Railway Children, iffy stage-school acting and all (though first-timer Hefferman is good). This in turn makes the brutality that awaits them more jarring and unbelievable. Indeed, when Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke pop up as the leaders of a criminal gang who rob the dead, they’re so over the top they’re like animated Disney grotesques made flesh in some Dickensian nightmare version of London. 

Paul Weller ― yes, that Paul Weller ― co-stars as George’s kindly grandfather, and has a couple of nice scenes with the under-utilised Ronan. But despite a couple of legitimately impressive sequences this is a major disappointment.

The Front RoomThe Front Room
The Front Room | Jon Pack

Written and directed by brothers Sam and Max Eggers (whose other sibling is Robert Eggers, acclaimed director of The Witch), The Front Room is a specious, pregnancy-themed horror film with zero scares, no psychological nuance and a very juvenile understanding of pregnancy, parenthood, ageing and how people actually function in the world.

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It stars 90s teen pop star-turned-actress Brandy Norwood as a heavily pregnant woman guilt-tripped into taking in her workaholic husband’s wicked but infirm stepmother (Kathryn Hunter). She’s a babbling, devious and racist religious fanatic who quickly gaslights her new stepdaughter-in-law for reasons that are never adequately explained. Gross-out yuks follow ― mostly involving incontinence and defecation ― and while Hunter goes above and beyond, this is weak stuff, a boiler-plate provocation pandering to the hipster house-style of US backers A24. 

The Room Next Door and The Front Room are in cinemas from 25 October; Blitz is on selected release from 1 November

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