Almodovar’s The Room Next Door (2024) and the Vice of Superstition

Credit: El Deseo Films. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures

Almodovar’s The Room Next Door (2024) is a good movie, and its atmosphere is much of what makes it good. On a first viewing, I had the sense that while the film occasionally flirted with disaster, there were only a few places where it might have sounded a truly off note. However, as I’ve thought more about it, I’ve wondered if the lapse might have been more in the viewer than the art.

The Room Next Door has a simple plot. At a signing for her recent book on death, Ingrid (Julian Moore), hears that an old friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton), is terribly sick. The two have been out of touch for years, though in their youth had worked together at a magazine. It’s soon revealed that Martha is facing inoperable cancer and requests Ingrid’s emotional support as she prepares to end her life.

The Room Next Door never lets the viewer get too comfortable. It does this in a few ways. For my money, the strongest is its consistent edging up to the surreal without fully embracing it.

It flouts the Chekhovian truism of never putting a gun on stage that won’t go off. The Room Next Door puts a lot of guns on stage, and none of them go off. Or maybe they do. Odd coincidences pile up without resolution: pills are weirdly lost and then easily found, potential romantic deceit ends up innocent, apparent apparitions and doppelgangers are hinted to be reasonable mix-ups.

In each case, the viewer is left suspended, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Over time, these add up to an uncanny, almost clinical overarching vibe. The film’s dreamy cinematography and foreboding thematic undercurrents (war, societal collapse, climate change) bolster the eerie tone.

The Room Next Door teases its audience, but it’s not cruel: the upshot is a fuzzy fever dream that feels as sweet as it does odd. Without evidence, I imagine death to be similar. Perhaps Almodovar does as well.

Almodovar is no amateur, but what he tries here is a daring feat. While overall a success, the film flirts with failure. My first take on it was that it only risked really going off the rails in a scene or two.

In one of these cases, after Ingrid’s death, Martha is brought in to speak with the police. The issue is whether Martha has legal responsibility for having vaguely assisted Ingrid in facilitating her own death. The officer interrogating her is dubious. He asks hostile questions. He’s abrasive and condescending, admitting to being bothered by the case. As a man of faith, he feels a personal stake in these things.

A religious police officer: a man of church and state. The connection was clear. Both institutions have a long history of shaping how we think about suicide, with the choice to self-murder long seen as an affront to the state’s authority over the lives of its citizens, on a legal register, and the beauty of god’s creation and gift of life, on a spiritual one.

The connection was so far from being off the mark that it was too on it. It felt a little on the nose. The film goes to great lengths to establish that Ingrid is in profound psychological and physical pain for an inoperable disease. Without success, she’s tried experimental treatments. Up to the end, she is sensitive to her friend’s feelings. Martha, for her part, faces and overcomes her own phobia of death, the subject of her recent book, to be there for an old friend (something the film arguably sells a little short; I’m still not sure if cashing in on that would have undermined its marvelously clinical tone or provided it with greater emotional resonance).

Trotting out an asshole cop to stand in for insensitive institutions we all love to hate felt like an otherwise subtle film descending to the realm of undergrad polemic: conservative religious thought undermines our freedoms and constrains freedom of expression, etc. The critique isn’t wrong so much as a little simplified. And, really, did you need to further soften the soft spot by making the cop so shrill and one-dimensional?

To be fair, Almodovar is far too skilled to let the film crash there, and he nicely gets things back on track as Martha’s lawyer handles the case in a suitably solved-but-not-solved fashion. But the scene gave me pause.

I saw The Room Next Door a few weeks back, and I’ve spent some of the time since revisiting classic texts on suicide: Durkheim, Plato, Camus, and the like. Of the group, Hume’s “Of Suicide” stood out as particularly incisive but also still shocking even 250 years after its first publication.

Hume opens by rhapsodizing on philosophy’s ability to combat superstition. His task then in the essay is to apply that critical spirit to superstitious thinking about suicide. It can almost feel satirical watching him make easy work of the arguments of his day.

His day, indeed. What might stand out to a contemporary reader is how dated the arguments he addresses aren’t. It really is true that at least parts of the Christian tradition continue to shape our thinking on suicide to a degree I hadn’t fully appreciated. It’s striking how consistently that connection turns up in the literature. Talk about (intellectual) history bearing down on the present.

To return to The Room Next Door, I don’t think the sociological point’s aptness excuses the concerns mentioned about the scene described above, but the strength of the connection between suicide and Christianity might put the film’s monochromatic lapse in a somewhat more sympathetic light.

Again, Hume’s goal in that essay is to clear the superstitious brush around our thinking on suicide. I certainly love that ideal of philosophy, though I’m not sure I’m quite as optimistic as Hume on its likelihood of success. Still, it’s possible that maybe Hume’s project worked a bit of its magic on me.

Superstition never feels like superstition. It has a knack for illusion. Some of its most potent guises are the common sense and the obvious. The on the nose.

To be sure, I’m a secular (though open-minded) thinker with the same distaste for the state that we all have. I’m not Almodovar’s target. Still, thinking back on the Hume leaves me wondering if The Room Next Door doesn’t so much skewer my own biases as provide fodder for an overarching superstitious sensibility. One that perhaps many of us have.

I haven’t fully worked out the terms, but I have started to wonder if part of my tendency to cast suicide in a commonsense understanding might not be a way of rationalizing the most persistent, profound, and profoundly disturbing questions dogging human experience: what type of life is worth living? Can such innocuous, familiar things as my own hands really choke out my whole universe?

Emphasizing the more clear-cut cases and getting impatient with those who get impatient with outmoded cultural baggage can simulate the feeling that the problem has been solved. The case is closed. Of course it’s reasonable under certain conditions, of course our institutions shouldn’t interfere with our freedoms, of course, of course, of course.

None of this is to let Almodovar off the hook altogether. The scene is too simplified. Still, it’s worth asking if I’m letting myself off the hook by keeping him on it.