‘The Room Next Door’ finds solace in the acceptance of death

“The Room Next Door” is director Pedro Almodóvar’s 25th feature film, and his first in English. The 75-year-old filmmaker has been building up to this for a few years now. His fantastic short “The Human Voice” from 2020 and “Strange Way of Life” from 2023 were brief forays into a language that the director is not entirely comfortable with. (He still keeps an English interpreter around for Q&As after the screening.) Tilda Swinton, who also starred in “The Human Voice,” headlines “The Room Next Door” as Martha, a former war correspondent dying of cervical cancer. She is visited at the hospital by Ingrid (Julianne Moore), an old colleague from their heady 1980s paper magazine days. As the two rekindle their friendship, Martha approaches Ingrid with an unusual request.

She won’t be returning for another round of treatment, but no one knows that yet. Martha has bought a euthanasia pill “off the dark web” and intends to take it, but she doesn’t want to do it alone. She doesn’t ask Ingrid to watch her die, she just wants to know that there is someone else there, in the next room. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, Almodóvar’s script is a much more subdued affair than we’ve come to expect from the manic melodramatic. The bad boy provocateur’s films have become increasingly classy and reflective in recent years, with the director’s 2019 “Pain and Glory” a particularly moving, nakedly autobiographical showdown with age and frailty.

The desire to go out on her own terms is what motivates Martha. She is furious with people who describe her “battle” with cancer as if a patient could somehow defeat an incurable disease if they just fought harder. Emaciated and losing her mental faculties from “chemo brain” – a horrifying fate for someone who made a career out of putting thoughts into words – Martha can feel herself slipping away and wants to end it before the disease takes more of her . It’s her way of winning the so-called match, declaring victory and leaving the field.

Ingrid is afraid of death. She even wrote a book about it. But she can’t say no to an old friend, so the two take a trip to the Catskills, where Martha has rented an almost comically beautiful marvel of modernist architecture (like most of the film’s locations, the house is actually in Spain) where they can both rest , writing and relaxing until Martha finally decides to end her life. It is the filmmaker’s most unexpectedly calm film, calm in its acceptance of the inevitable.

It’s hard to think of two more obvious choices than Swinton and Moore for Almodóvar’s first English-language leading ladies, as they are both icons of independent film and longtime muses of queer cinema pioneers. You also just know he couldn’t wait to dress them up, with the statuesque Swinton outfitted in flowing pieces of fabric and Moore’s fire engine red hair and lipstick offset with so many shades of green she looks like Christmas. These two actresses are particularly adept at heightened, stylized dialogue, of which “The Room Next Door” has some clumsy mouthfuls.

The film has been panned by many critics for the way these characters speak. Almodóvar’s script is heavy on exposition and allergic to subtext. It took me a while to figure out why “The Room Next Door” sounded so familiar, and then I realized that the dialogue is straight out of an 80’s Woody Allen movie. Everyone tells you how they know each other and exactly what’s on their mind. These are broad, sophisticated New Yorkers who ponder art, literature, morality, and death while hanging out in bookstores and attending classic cultural events. Heck, if you recast the two leads with Mia Farrow and Dianne Wiest, the movie could be from Allen’s “Another Woman” era.

John Turturro co-stars as an old flame of both Martha and Ingrid, who becomes the latter’s secret confidant during the ordeal. He’s basically playing the Max von Sydow role from “Hannah and Her Sisters,” a brilliant, lady-killing professor turned reclusive, pathetic jerk. He’s obsessed with climate change and is one of those guys who never really left the house after the pandemic, the kind who uses casual conversation as an excuse to tell you about “neoliberalism.” Turturro being Turturro, he does it all with a sly eye towards trying to get Moore back into bed. (The character even apes Allen’s creepiest screenwriter, constantly talking about “making love.”) There’s also a one-scene wonder of a performance by frequent movie-thief Alessandro Nivola as a busy, Christian cop. Everyone is always so stylishly outfitted in Almodóvar films that you know to watch out for the guy in khakis and a polo shirt.

Maybe the dialogue didn’t bother me because every other aspect of the movie is so stylized as well. No one else’s film looks like Pedro Almodóvar’s, which takes place in a beautifully designed alternate reality where even the tenement house has an Edward Hopper painting on the wall. I could only dream of living in one of these apartments, with their recessed cupboards and wallpaper coordinated with the actresses’ outfits. “The Room Next Door” was pretty obviously filmed in Spain — check out the accents on today’s players — with its vision of New York City as much an imaginary construct as Allen’s squeaky-clean Manhattan.

There’s a notable scene shot on location at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, an inside joke Almodóvar clearly designed to bring down the house when “The Room Next Door” was screened there during the New York Film Festival. There’s always something magical about watching the movie theater that you’re sitting in during the movie you’re watching, as anyone who saw “The Holdovers” at the Somerville Theater can attest.

The story has some odd speed bumps, and a curious casting choice near the end makes promises that never quite pay off, but I’m always taken by how smooth and easy to watch Almodóvar’s films are, even when they’re not quite successful. Scenes flow into each other so effortlessly that there is something comforting about his relaxed command of film grammar. Especially during a movie like this that is about finding solace in acceptance and grace. We all die alone, but if you’re lucky, there might be someone in the next room.

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“The Room Next Door” opens at AMC Boston Common and that Alamo Drafthouse Seaport Thursday, January 9 and at Coolidge Corner Theatre Friday, January 10.