Like, really, REALLY in English, with English filling up every nook and cranny, and all the actors endlessly blathering in English, and expressing emotions that we could have been easily understood with a bit of damn silence.
Partially shot in New York and New Jersey, but mostly outside Madrid, this features celebrated stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, both of whom try hard to stop it being too ridiculously overwrought. However, compared to Pedro’s most famed and distinctive films, from outrageous titles like What Have I Done To Deserve This?, Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, to award-winners including All About My Mother, Bad Education, and Volver, it’s almost startlingly poor.
Author Ingrid (Julianne) is at a book-signing event when she’s informed that her old friend Martha (Tilda) is battling cancer, and soon the pair are reunited and chatting away in early scenes that prove bizarrely awkward. They discuss how they worked at a magazine years ago, they recall old acquaintances and sometimes-shared lovers, they go on (and on, and on) about Martha’s career as a war photographer, and they yak about Martha’s illness, and how exactly she feels about it.
There are surprisingly cliché-ridden flashbacks to when Martha was a teen (where Esther McGregor doesn’t look like Tilda in the slightest), all of which could have been directed by any old hack, and then finally we get to the crux of the plot. And as it’s given away in the trailer, so it shall be here too: Martha wants Ingrid to accompany her for a month or so in a fancy holiday house near Woodstock (no, it’s not!), and be there when Martha eventually ends her own life.
Such heavily emotional and potentially controversial material could have been turned into something beautiful and moving like, at a pinch, director Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (which starred Julianne), but in Pedro’s hands everything feels so forced and phony. There’s also precious little of his trademark raunchy humour, oodles of over-the-top music from Alberto Iglesias, a bit by John Turturro where he beats us over the head with climate-change-related horrors, and an almost complete absence of this filmmaker’s legendary colour schemes, with a visual style that’s all shadows and sickly greens.
What else can possibly be said except that this is the most disappointing mainstream movie of 2024 by far.
The Room Next Door
In cinemas now. (MA)
3.5 stars out of 5
