Cassandra Neyenesch at Public Books:
Martha, a journalist played by Tilda Swinton, has terminal cancer. She asks her friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to come away with her to a house in upstate New York and be in the room next door when she takes a suicide pill she bought on the dark web. Like all of Pedro Almodóvar’s films, The Room Next Door is gorgeous to look at, completely unsentimental, and staunchly uninterested in absolutes, rules, or dogmas. This is Almodóvar’s gift: moral gray tones painted in vibrant colors. When Martha says the gangster line, “Cancer can’t get me if I get me first,” we sense that it’s an expression of Almodóvar’s own defiant punk spirit.
Almodóvar is an artist of eros, in the sense that the dynamics between the characters tend to escalate into sex, not infrequently rape. The director is sex obsessed, but in earlier films like Talk to Her and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! he also uses sex to provoke discomfort, disgust, and titillation in the viewer. It works because he himself is a siren, and he is seducing us. His movies are so ravishing and hilarious that we find ourselves helpless to patrol our boundaries, and we just give in to their transgressive spell.
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