‘The Room Next Door’ is a poignant testament to the power and need for human interconnection, with two tender performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in this euthanasia-themed drama about absence and presence. Swinton’s character Martha is dying of terminal cancer and asks an erstwhile friend Ingrid (Moore) to be there for her in her final days – not in order to assist her with ending her life, but simply being there – in the room next door, literally – while she does it.

There are moral as well as legal questions here which are addressed well in a film which, coming from Pedro Almodóvar, has rich layers of texture and nuance, including the presenting of Ingrid as an author who writes about death because she has such difficulty facing it in her life. This either makes her the most perfect or the least perfect candidate to accompany Martha in her last days, and the film addresses some of the prosaic and incidental things that the two women venture towards doing as Martha’s end is imminent.

Ingrid is not, however, privy to when Martha will end her life – which works to her advantage from a legal perspective as Ingrid can then truthfully avow that she was not an accomplice. There are manifold references to the importance of living each day as if it might be one’s last, and there is the clever device of bringing into the story a former lover of both women, played by veteran character actor John Turturro, who aids Ingrid with the legal side of things while Martha plans her death.

Some of the dialogue comes across as a little too mannered and clunky, but this adds to the sense that both women are living in a heightened state of existence in which neither of them quite know how to process the imminent incursion of death and where neither feel entirely confident that they are in control of events. This is brought to the fore in a scene that in the wrong hands could have been played for laughs, in which Martha realizes upon arriving in the AirBnB where she has come to see out her last days that she forgot to pack the euthanasia tablet with her and which she had procured from ‘the dark web’.

Ingrid is concerned that it is a sign that maybe Martha does not really want to go through with the termination, and there is a genuine question as to whether Martha is entirely in control of her faculties, pumped up by she is by drugs that are meant to assist her in her dying days. There is also a beguiling Almodóvar tactic of drawing, Hitchcock-style, on having one of the actresses play two different women and of the way artifice and a heightened colour palette gives ‘The Room Next Door’ a somewhat surreal, slightly heightened sense of reality, and inviting us to question whether everything is really playing out in anything resembling linear time.