Film Review Double Feature: "A Real Pain" and "The Room Next Door"
Two remarkable new films grapple with the thorny question of death: how we deal with or don't, and the marks that it leaves on our hearts, our souls, and our minds.
Hello, dear reader! Do you like what you read here at Omnivorous? Do you like reading fun but insightful takes on all things pop culture? Do you like supporting indie writers? If so, then please consider becoming a subscriber and get the newsletter delivered straight to your inbox. There are a number of paid options, but you can also sign up for free! Every little bit helps. Thanks for reading and now, on with the show!
Warning: Full spoilers for the films follow.
Like Barbie, I sometimes find myself thinking about death, so it’s a bit fitting that two recent films, A Real Pain and The Room Next Door, deal with this in their own ways. Beautiful, haunting, and at times bleakly funny, these two films remind us that there are many ways of looking at, and contending with, death.
A Real Pain, written, directed by, and starring Jesse Eisenberg, focuses on his character, David Kaplan, who joins his cousin, Benji (Kieran Culkin), for a trip to Poland, where they plan to reconnect with one another, their Polish Jewish heritage, and their late grandmother. They are a study in opposites: David has a family and a stable job, even if he is also riddled with anxiety, while Benji has a more freewheeling approach to life, with a mouth that never stops running. Whereas David is a bit of a wallflower, Benji, as becomes clear again and again during the course of their tour, is the center of attention in every room he enters.
For as much as the film is filtered through David’s perspective, this is very much Benji’s movie and so, by extension, it is also Culkin’s. There are shades of Roman Roy in his characterization, from Benji’s tendency to talk a mile a minute–often without much forethought as to what he’s going to say (or its consequences) until the words are out of his mouth and in the world–to the pain that seems to always lurk just beneath the surface. One gets the sense that his motormouth is a coping mechanism, his political radicalism a means by which he grapples with the specter of death: his own, that of his grandmother, and that of the many Polish Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust.
Indeed, death hovers over this film in ways both large and small. After all, the entire reason that the cousins have embarked on this journey is because their grandmother has died and left them some money so they can go to their ancestral homeland. It becomes clear that Benji has had a particularly difficult time grappling with her passing since, as David remarks, the two of them were quite close, even going so far as to have their own secret language. Thus, for as much as the trip to Poland is a means of connecting with his grandmother’s traumatic past, it’s also a reminder for Benji that she is no longer alive.
Even more haunting, for both David and the viewer alike, is that it’s ultimately revealed Benji tried to take his own life shortly before the film began. He might have survived, but David’s anxiety-ridden mind can’t help but keep replaying the image of his cousin’s body twisted in death, just as he can’t quite make sense of why someone who is seemingly in love with life would try to take his own life. It’s a haunting question, and it’s one that even Benji doesn’t seem to have the ability to answer, Culkin’s haunted features showing us, and David, his inner turmoil.
At a broader level, A Real Pain is also about these two young Jewish men and their attempts to grapple with the enormity of the Holocaust and how it drastically reshaped not just their grandmother’s life but also their own. Every time they see a Jewish tombstone or a place where a Jewish business once stood, they’re reminded of how a campaign of mass death and murder robbed them and their people of past and a future. There’s something particularly (and appropriately) haunting about the moment when the tour group visits a concentration camp, a building that is a reminder of the most horrifying event of the 20th century. It’s an injunction to David, Benji, and to all of us to not only bear witness to the past but also to continue living.
In the end, though, it’s just as much a celebration of life as it is a rumination on the shadow of death. At film’s end the two cousins have each learned some things: about themselves, certainly, but also about the world around them and the ways that they both could change. Benji, it would seem, has learned about the value of life and of continuing to live, even through loss and pain and death. David, likewise, has learned the power of letting go, of not trying to control every aspect of his life, whether big or small.
Perhaps it’s because I still grapple with the meaning and loss of my own grandmother back in 2020, but something about A Real Pain just seemed to pierce me. It’s one of those rare films that really manages to keep the laughs and the tears coming in equal and balanced measure. It never shies away from the hard stuff and from the brutal realities of life, death, and history. Those we love might be gone, and some part of our hearts may never fully heal from their departure, but it’s still up to us to hold their memories close and, despite everything, live the very best life that we can.
Death is also the motivator for the plot of Pedro Almodóvar’s newest film, The Room Next Door. Julianne Moore stars as Ingrid, a successful author who unexpectedly reconnects with an old friend, Tilda Swinton’s Martha. While at first their reunion is mostly happy–this, despite Martha’s cervical cancer diagnosis–it soon takes a more somber turn once the treatments stop working. Martha then comes to Ingrid with a remarkable and shocking proposal: she is going to take a suicide pill, and she wants Martha to be in the room next door when she does so. After a great deal of soul-searching Ingrid agrees, and the rest of the film focuses on the consequences of that decision.
The Room Next Door is remarkably subdued for Almodóvar, a director known for his melodramatic sensibilities and his often-striking use of color. To be sure, there is some of the latter in this film, particularly when it comes to the red door of Martha’s room. As part of the arrangement with Ingrid, she won’t tell her when she’s going to do the deed; instead, she’ll know when the door is shut that Martha has died. This seems like a great system, until one night the wind blows the door closed, leading Ingrid to experience something of a bleakly comic rehearsal of the actual event itself.
Both Moore and Swinton are at their best here. Moore has made a career out of playing ever-so-slightly neurotic women, and her Ingrid is very much in this mold. From the moment we meet her it’s clear that she has not just an aversion to death–something that most people have–but instead something deeper: an inability to comprehend or deal with it. Moore manages to capture the complexities of Ingrid’s journey as she grapples with what it would mean to be a part of Martha’s suicide, the toll that it’s going to take on her. Through her, we all are forced to grapple with the inevitability of our mortality, asking ourselves: how do we make the most out of what days are given to us?
Tilda Swinton is also nothing short of extraordinary as Martha. Swinton usually excels at playing women and other people who are at a certain remove from the people and world around them and, often, from their own feelings. There’s a raw sort of openness in her performance as Martha, however, that allows her to dominate the screen. Whether it’s grappling with the fact that she is largely estranged from her daughter–who, it will subsequently be revealed, is also played by Swinton, in a very Almodóvarian doubling–or the fact of her own mortality, Swinton leaves it all on the table. It’s the kind of performance that practically begs for an Oscar. As the cancer slowly strips away her pleasures in life, she at least can take some solace in that she will die on her own terms, with dignity.
Therein, I think, lies this film’s profundity. “There are many ways to live inside a tragedy,” Ingrid says at one point to her former lover Damian (John Turturro), who is fiercely committed to his life’s purpose of revealing the hopelessness of humanity’s future in the face of climate change. Though she has every reason to give in to despair, and though her own existence is in a sense overshadowed by Martha’s imminent death–which, unbeknownst to her, is taking place even as she’s having this conversation–she is still determined to seize what joy she can, to make Martha’s last days one’s of companionship rather than loneliness and despair. Moore shines in this moment, and it’s one of her finest performances.
If I have one complaint about this film, it’s that the denouement feels a bit rushed. There’s a brief interrogation in which the police express no small amount of skepticism that Ingrid knew nothing of Martha’s intentions, but this is largely swept aside. The reunion with Martha’s daughter is likewise a bit tacked-on, though there’s something fitting of the film’s final image of the two of them reclining on the loungers outside while Ingrid recites a variation of one of Martha’s favorite passages: the ending of James Joyce’s The Dead.
Even so, there’s still a quiet power to The Room Next Door. There’s aching sadness here, to be sure, and I remember well the feeling of devastation that hit me when Ingrid returns home from that fraught lunch with Damian to discover that Martha has chosen her absence as the moment to end her own life. At the same time, it’s also about celebrating life, even when faced with the inevitability of death, whether it be of a person or the planet.
As with A Real Pain, The Room Next Door hits particularly close for me, as both of my parents have been diagnosed with cancer in the last decade. I’ll admit that I am one of those, like Ingrid, who struggles with the inevitability of death, and I find myself wanting my parents to fight every day, to stave off the death that I know can never be fully avoided. Watching Martha deride this perspective–that one must “fight” against cancer, that it’s all a battle that one must win or lose–was a salutary reminder that there are other ways of viewing cancer and death, even though I may not want to admit it.
This is the power of the movies.