Pedro Almodóvar’s Self-Indulgent Portrait of a Woman’s Last Days

The temptation to beautify—and, in doing so, obfuscate—death on the big screen is nothing new. In Dark Victory (1939), Bette Davis’s Long Island socialite grows increasingly radiant in sync with the brain tumor that her dashing physician assures her will culminate in a painless, even euphoric, passing; Love Story (1970) made Ali MacGraw a Radcliffe-educated nymph challenged by her own comically inconvenient leukemia. Almodóvar, who is a model cinephile, is surely aware of this tradition and, like any worthy postmodernist, tries to use it both ways—as a shorthand for and subversion of tear-jerking sentimentality. Martha’s suffering is depicted realistically but kept at a careful distance in the hospital sequences; by the time our heroines get to the rented house, any sense of physical discomfort has been sublimated into a series of cozily posed tableaux. When Ingrid and Martha curl up to watch John Huston’s valedictory film adaptation of The Dead, the moment feels a touch too cozy, as if Almodóvar were blanketing his own identity in warm, fuzzy annotation.

It’s a potentially striking approach to difficult material: By so thoroughly sanitizing Martha’s struggle, the director is both pointing us toward our collective comfort zone about death, and strategically renovating it. The implication is that most of what we, no less than Martha and Ingrid, know about dying comes from the movies; in this context, we become obliged to imagine ourselves as protagonists in a story whose ending is all too predictable.

“There are lots of ways to live inside a tragedy,” Ingrid says, a sentiment that’s meant to be comforting but feels better suited to Almodóvar’s other films, with their wild shifts of pacing and rhythm. The Room Next Door is so exquisitely funereal that the tone itself has a touch of rigor mortis; for these characters, as written, there’s only one way to live inside this particular tragedy, and it’s in a soporific trance, gazing meaningfully at each other while patiently waiting out a foregone conclusion. There’s a moment when it seems Martha has jumped the gun on her proposed timeline, which earns a mordant laugh, but such eruptions are few and far between.