The Room Next Door (12A, 106 mins)

Verdict: Timely and engaging

With the current brouhaha over ᴀssisted dying, and MPs due to vote next month on whether to legalise it in the UK, the great Spanish director and screenwriter Pedro Almodovar has chosen a burning-H๏τ topic for his first English-language feature, The Room Next Door.

It’s a decidedly highbrow film, with lots of literary and philosophical chat. But then euthanasia is a lofty subject, and in any case the picture is saved from any threat of pomposity or dreariness by a pair of impeccable performances from Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore. 

I saw it last month at the Venice Film Festival, where it understandably won the main prize,the Golden Lion.

Martha (Swinton) and Ingrid (Moore, both right) are old friends who have lost touch but reconnect when Ingrid hears that Martha is dying of cervical cancer.

Martha is an illustrious war correspondent, semi-estranged from her daughter, her only child. Ingrid is a writer, too, who is working on a book about the artist Dora Carrington. 

Tilda Swinton as Martha and Julianne Moore as Ingrid in the Room Next Door 

Julianne Moore as Ingrid and Tilda Swinton as Martha

Years earlier the two of them were colleagues on a trendy magazine, and even had a lover in common, Damian, played by John Turturro.

But despite Damian and a few other tangential characters, The Room Next Door is essentially a two-hander.

Inspired by a 2020 novel — What Are You Going Through, by the American writer Sigrid Nunez — it could easily be a play. 

But Almodovar, as you would expect, makes the most of his camera. His film is lovely on the eye, and keeps the mind engaged, too.

The director is a strong advocate for ᴀssisted dying, which is already legal in Spain, but doesn’t let his convictions get in the way of his story-telling.

He helps us out with occasional flashbacks. We see how the young Martha got pregnant by her troubled ex-boyfriend shortly after his return from serving in Vietnam.

But her own career in combat zones did not exactly facilitate single parenthood. She clearly hasn’t been much of a mother, and dealt with the perils of her job by becoming downright promiscuous. Yet Ingrid is never judgmental.

Their rekindled friendship acquires a new intensity when Martha confides that she has managed to obtain a ‘euthanasia pill’ on the so-called dark web. 

She plans to rent a house in upstate New York and kill herself there, but wants Ingrid to be her companion on those last steps of the journey, and ‘to be in the next room’ when she swallows the ᴅᴇᴀᴅly tablet.

It’s what you might call a big ask, but the unfailingly empathetic Ingrid agrees.

The house is an amazing modernist place near Woodstock, and I confess that I winced a little at the middle-class affluence of it all, as if well-heeled, highlyeducated, writerly types — who casually drop James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway into conversation like some of us drop Premier League football and The Great British Bake Off — are the only people who can ignite a proper meditation on death.

There’s also a slightly forced analogy between Martha’s impending demise and, according to Damian who is a fierce climate-change campaigner, that of the planet.

But Swinton and Moore are both so excellent that these reservations flutter away like the Catskills leaves. Watching their characters interact as they swap confidences and sometimes get a little ratty with each other feels like a privilege.

There are hints of a final-act twist, even a thriller element, but really Almodovar trusts us just to wallow in their acting and his writing.

 

The Front Room (15, 94 mins)

Verdict: A grisly debut

From one meaningful room to another, The Front Room is a psychological horror film with comedic undertones, or maybe overtones.

A mixed-race couple, the heavily pregnant Belinda (Brandy Norwood) and her ineffectual husband Norman (Andrew Burnap), are compelled to share a home with his despised and difficult stepmother Solange (Kathryn Hunter, giving a genuine tour de force as she fully inhabits the part of a nightmarish live-in relative).

The racist and nuttily religious Solange is also wilfully incontinent, an affliction with which first-time writer-directors Max and Sam Eggers have distasteful fun.

Their half-brother Robert Eggers has impressive form in the horror genre, including The Witch (2015). This film isn’t in the same league but it has a certain grisly swagger

Unwelcome guest: Solange (Kathryn Hunter) in the Front Room 

 

Fright night with seminal slasher Freddy

Just as people called Harry Potter might not have thanked JK Rowling, so we should spare a thought for those, such as my wife’s grandma, Nellie, who lived on Elm Street before Wes Craven, in 1984, made it synonymous with terror.

Her Elm Street, just outside Barnsley, was a long way from his in Ohio, but still. The jokes never dried up.

Nellie is long gone now,and so, we have to hope, is Freddy Krueger.

This week’s 40th anniversary re-release, just in time for Halloween, reminds us why A Nightmare On Elm Street (HHHHH, 15, 91 mins) remains such a seminal slasher film and why Krueger (Robert Englund, left), the sadistic ᴅᴇᴀᴅ child-killer with a burning grievance who infiltrated the dreams of impressionable teenagers (one of them played by 21-year-old Johnny Depp in his movie debut), became such an iconic screen psycho. 

Also, it’s barely an hour and a half long, a relic of an age when horror-film directors understood the art of brevity.

A nightmare on Elm Street les griffes de la nuit Year: 1984

 

Venom: The Last Dance (15, 109 mins)

Verdict: A dog’s dinner

by Larushka Ivan-Zadeh for the Daily Mail

Halloween feels an appropriate time to bury the superhero franchise era. Venom: The Last Dance certainly feels like we’re watching its death throes.

To recap, this is the third and (here’s hoping) final outing for Tom Hardy (the sole reason to watch this) as troubled journalist Eddie Brock, who gained super-villain powers after becoming the host of a chatty fanged alien symbiote called Venom, who likes to munch off baddies’ heads.

Halloween feels an appropriate time to bury the superhero franchise era. Venom: The Last Dance certainly feels like we’re watching its death throes

A bog-standard comic book blockbuster set-up sees an evil alien megalomaniac determined to destroy the universe, if only he can get hold of a glowing thingamabob called a codex, which is locked inside Eddie/ Venom.

The comedy is below par, the set-pieces distinctly unmemorable and the plot holes are gaping.

A majority British cast, also including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Rhys Ifans and Stephen Graham, are left hanging about, gawping at not-that-special effects.

The odd bromance between Eddie and his slimy black pal remains the USP. Die-hard fans (the only ones with a shout of understanding the story line) may also enjoy the lashings of cartoonish violence. But, bottom line: it’s a dog’s dinner. And I feel sorry for that dog.