Review: Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore are remarkable in ‘The Room Next Door’

For her performance in “The Room Next Door,” Tilda Swinton is now a Golden Globe nominee for best actress in a drama. Whether or not she wins a Globe on Sunday, Swinton deserves to share recognition with her brilliant co-star Julianne Moore. The two almost breathe as one in their remarkable acting duet.

Also of note: “The Room Next Door,” now in theaters after winning the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, is the first full-length feature in English from Spain’s legendary wild man, the writer and director Pedro Almodóvar, who modulates his usual flamboyance to match the softer cadences of the heart.

You can almost hear the heartbeats of these old friends, who gather in a country rental home near Woodstock in upstate New York.

Swinton plays Martha, a war correspondent who hasn’t seen Ingrid (Moore) since their younger days as journalists at the same magazine. The house is filled with windows that open up to the sights and sounds of nature humming with life.

This idyllic house, where Edward Hopper’s painting “People In The Sun” hangs on a wall, is also the place where Martha has come to die.

Not with sadness or resignation about her terminal cancer but as the act of a fiercely independent woman who wants to go out on her own terms.

She has asked only that Ingrid accompany her and live in the room next door until she’s ready to take the euthanasia pill she obtained on the dark web. Since she has barely spoken to Martha in decades, Ingrid wonders why Martha hasn’t chosen a closer friend to assist in her suicide. It turns out she has, but they all refused to comply for reasons personal and legal.

“The Room Next Door” soars on the piercing connection between these two women, with Ingrid bonding so closely with Martha that she asks permission to write about Martha after her passing. There is even a direct evocation of “The Dead,” the James Joyce short story about the snow of mortality that falls on us all.

If Almodóvar had trusted himself to stay up close and personal with these extraordinary women in crisis, “The Room Next Turn” would rank among the filmmaker’s best. Sadly, that’s not what happens.

Basing his script on Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel “What Are You Going Through,” Almodóvar breaks the mesmerizing aura created by Swinton and Moore for a series of awkward flashbacks that work on the page but feel clunky and intrusive on screen.

We watch Martha and Ingrid, played by younger actors, make career decisions as they drift in and out of relationships, including hooking up at different times with the same man, Damian (John Turturro), a joyous presence now reduced to stern lectures on environmental collapse.

There is even a climactic visit from Martha’s daughter, Michelle, also played by Swinton, who resents her mother for refusing to reveal the identity of her father, who we see in a violent vision rushing into a burning building.

Almodóvar freights these scenes with tangled subplots and themes of personality transference that tilt the movie off course, when all we need to know is written on the faces of Swinton and Moore. Their extraordinary artistry makes this death-fixated film feel thrillingly alive.