The bright lights of Manhattan paint the first snow with colorful patterns. For some, his whiteness marks a new and completely clean page in life, still untainted by problems and not covered with a to-do list for the coming week. But for others, winter is the last warm days, the final chord of the outgoing year, and maybe of a lifetime.
Among the first is writer Ingrid, who is stuck between another move and the release of a book. She flaunts that she is not afraid to look death in the eye, as long as her novels are honest to the reader. It's easy to say that when you're at the top of your career and with a couple happy decades ahead of you.
On the other side of the barricades is her young friend Martha, who meets the cold in her hospital bed. Cancer filled everyday life with poetic melancholy over the past days and a heap of regrets for both what was done and what was lost. Her daughter hates her, love didn't work out at all, and she will have to continue her career as a military journalist in the next world.
When they meet in the chilling glow of the hospital corridors, old friends once again become accomplices in a forgotten but still living past. No offense, just an attempt to make up for years of alienation drowned in work and hundreds of indifferent excuses. And at the same time, an extra opportunity to look back on your own stories in search of something that will make imminent death less bitter.
In the movie “Pain and Glory” Pedro Almodovar reflected on past years and broken relationships with the same sadness as Tilda Swinton's heroine in “The Room Next Door”. But while the past picture looked to the future with a slight hope and made peace with the past, the new one is ruled by longing and emptiness of elusive days.
Martha opens up a whole panorama of memories for Ingrid — passionate love interests, painful breakups, and moments when life seemed like both the greatest gift and the most relentless challenge. What saddens her most is her daughter's alienation, who blames her mother for her father's death and her ruined childhood. But there is no time left to correct this situation.
To prevent death from having the opportunity to make the first move in the upcoming game, Martha takes matters into her own hands. But to do this, she needs Ingrid to live in the room next door, endure her changeable mood and endless waves of memories. The main character is not so afraid to die alone, but busy people will have plenty to do even after death, so it's useful to find a successor for them in advance.
A strange friendship brings women to a secluded mysterious home, where architectural rigor is intertwined with the vulnerability of nature and creates an atmosphere of dreary expectation and inevitable fate. In this nostalgic hideaway, Martha arranges her last days, choosing, like an artist, the brightest brush strokes from her passing life.
Against the background of almost silent conversations, when what was said gets stuck outside of time and space, another person's voice also breaks through. That Martha, whose life has always been sidelined — with an important job, an attempt to improve relations with her daughter and survive the death of someone she once loved. But she doesn't have much time left, obviously not enough to find her lost faith in humanity.
According to Martha, people are stubbornly pushing the world into the abyss, and we should not wait for a break from endless disasters. The profession of a military journalist is becoming more and more popular, but this is no longer her problem. It seems to her that the story will end in something lost in the woods, both global and personal. And when there is no future, the gaze involuntarily turns to the past.
Martha's final retreat, almost mythological and timeless, resembles a sanctuary where familiar ailments and bustle dissolve into eternity. Disease and war, faces and voices are disappearing, and the line between living and dead is blurring. It's like Martha died in the hospital when her sarcastically acrid soul got here.
In this monologue, Pedro Almodovar addresses frailty, as if reading a farewell letter to himself. He sees aging not as a tragedy of missed opportunities, but as the natural end of a life cycle, when it's time to quietly go through the dusty box of past moments. The director used to try to atone for internal contradictions and heal his wounds, but now his sad voice is much calmer, and his ambitions recede before acceptance.
The anticipation of the last holiday turned Pedro Almadovar's usual bright tones into a muted palette of memories. The colors haven't completely disappeared, but only turned pale, as evidence that even the most intense moments will lose intensity over time. Martha will meet her death amidst soft but still colorful colors, confirming that even the last step can be taken with pride.
In “The Room Next Door”, death has no power over a fading body, or a smoldering memory, or the pale brightness of life. Pedro Almodovar stopped looking for answers in the present and the future, as if he had come to terms with the fact that even eternity did not have time to fix all his problems. And as his rest of his work shows, breakups are inevitable, but often even the hardest journey is more interesting than the silence to come.
