This article appeared in the October 18, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024)

In the early 1920s, masses of people sought comfort in spiritualism, consulting mediums to communicate with the dearly departed. God and the afterlife were still in play, and most families had recently lost at least one member, either to the First World War or to the (even deadlier) Spanish flu. At Harvard and elsewhere, scientists were exploring psychic phenomena; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, spurred by the loss of his son to a war-related illness, went on a crusade to convince the bereaved that they could commune with the dead through an earthly conduit.

We in the godless 2020s have little faith in an afterlife. It stands to reason that David Cronenberg, maestro of body horror, de-sublimator of our darkest fears, would find a way of mourning his dead wife that fixates on the corporeal rather than the transcendental. In The Shrouds, his eerily subdued new film, the “medium” is a high-tech cemetery where headstones are equipped with video screens, and the grief-stricken can observe their loved ones’ decomposing bodies through cell-phone apps. The uncanniness begins with Karsh, entrepreneur and mourner-in-chief, played by Vincent Cassel as a Cronenberg look-and-sound-alike. A queasily comic opening in a dentist’s chair establishes the abiding Cronenberg theme that the agonies of the soul are visited on the flesh: Karsh is told that his teeth are rotting from grief. Would Karsh like the dentist to send him JPEGs of his and his wife’s teeth?

Shortly after, Karsh goes on a blind date at his own mortuary-themed restaurant abutting the cemetery. Here, as if the nearby graves weren’t sufficiently macabre, we are surrounded by grisly X-ray art—spidery webs of viscera, ligaments, bones—all suggestive of that historical icon, the Shroud of Turin. According to legend, on the winding cloth in which Christ was wrapped, an imprint of his body appeared miraculously. The image is best rendered in black-and-white photographic negatives, a monochrome palette that infuses the visual motifs of The Shrouds. Following the meal, Karsh takes his date on a tour of the cemetery, then to view his wife’s remains, a calamitous move—the nauseated woman flees—which leads us to suspect that he’s not yet ready to “move on” to the next stage of Kübler-Ross’s spectrum of grief.

Visual if not emotional relief comes with the marginally brighter interiors of Karsh’s apartment (sepia, low-slung Japanese furnishings), and his wary but comradely conversations with Terry (Diane Kruger), his dead wife’s identical twin sister who has her own eccentricities. (Becca, the wife, has extracted a deathbed vow from Karsh that he will not sleep with her sister, which pretty much assures us he will.) Karsh insists that it’s Becca’s body he clings to and lives with, an obsession that’s borne out by brightly lit dream sequences in which Becca (also played by Kruger) visits him in his bedroom, exposing the bodily ravages of cancer—sometimes with and sometimes without the breast that was removed.

The mystery—what Karsh calls a “perfect detective story,” and is anything but—arises when the cemetery is vandalized and the search for the perpetrator branches into one possibility after another… and another, and another. Is it Terry’s truculent ex-husband (Guy Pearce), a grizzled and bitter tech nerd? Or is it the clinic where doctors want to perform experiments on the corpses? What about Becca’s missing oncologist and former lover? Or the Russians or the Chinese or the eco-activists? Compounding the problem and proliferating the suspects—and reinforcing the incestuous hall-of-mirrors aspect of the film—is Karsh’s virtual assistant, the cheery blonde Hunny, an on-screen doppelganger of Becca who is voiced by Kruger.

The sense of everyone as simulacra—a feature of our present-day reality, in which AI is remaking humanity as surely and irresistibly as the storm surge of a Category Five hurricane—has a soul-deadening effect, a phenomenon to which The Shrouds is both testimonial and victim. What’s always drawn me to Cronenberg is that his ghost stories are grounded in the real rather than the supernatural. In true Freudian fashion (his own “dangerous method”), he consistently takes morbid delight in externalizing bodily desires that we repress at our peril. “Surgery is the new sex” was the motto of Cronenberg’s last film, Crimes of the Future (2022), set in a world where people live indefinitely as compromised organs are replaced, forced to carry on—and even perform—with their insides exposed.

But in this new film, the body fixation seems different, perverse—alienating rather than stimulating. Even Howard Shore’s score seems bleaker and more forlorn than usual. The Shrouds is nothing if not personal, and indicative of a darker turn in the director’s career. He hasn’t worked much since his wife Carolyn Zeifman’s death in 2017, and one of his most chilling recent efforts is a short film, The Death of David Cronenberg (2021), in which he crawls into bed with his own corpse. Karsh’s obsession with Terry/Becca’s body, with and without breasts, with and without arms, and the queasy eroticism of these scenes, speak to the director’s lifelong concern with identity. “Is it physical or is it mental?” is the question posed by his 1986 opus The Fly. If you change yourself physically, do you change yourself mentally, too? Karsh’s determination to hold onto the body, whether as corpse or bedroom fantasy, leaves out the mental and thus what most of us treasure in those we mourn: imagination, personality, character, soul. Without the meeting of two minds, there is no release, no exorcism.

To speak of David Cronenberg and Pedro Almodóvar in the same breath is not as much of a stretch as it might seem. With a morbid theatricality on the one hand and flamboyant histrionics on the other, both have played around with the permutations of the flesh. Almodóvar’s body-horror efforts include reincarnation via live-skin grafting in The Skin I Live In (2011), and Talk to Her (2002), in which two men become obsessed with the comatose women for whom they are caring—a premise as creepy as anything in Cronenberg’s filmography. Even more to the point, both directors are on the far side of 70—or 80 in Cronenberg’s case—and in a retrospective mood. Almodóvar hasn’t staged his own death, but the woefully impaired director played by Antonio Banderas in his Pain and Glory (2019) comes close.

What he has done with The Room Next Door, his first English-language feature, is something of a slow-burn miracle. In adapting Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through, a meandering, first-person novel, Almodóvar has pared down the endless chance meetings and interlocutions through which two souls might meet, and warily form a gradual bond, into a chamber drama. As the two leads, Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton have never been better, or subtler, and that’s saying a lot. Moore plays a writer, Ingrid, and Swinton a onetime war correspondent, Martha. They were once dear friends but are now brought together by chance just as the latter enters the terminal stage of cancer. She’s about to take a month’s leave, supposedly to rest up for further treatment, but has decided to take her own life instead, and has procured a euthanasia pill on “the dark web.”

I’ve tried to figure out what it is about this film that got to me so powerfully. At first I felt disengaged, even repelled. Martha makes a request of Ingrid, to come live with her as she dies, that I found outrageous, if not downright heinous. Martha tells Ingrid she has asked closer friends, who’ve refused—no wonder. She plans to do it in such a way that Ingrid won’t be legally implicated, but the fact remains that her friend could be held accountable. And beyond even that, imagine asking somebody you haven’t seen in years to sit around, helplessly and on call, while you die.

As it turns out, the very fact that they were once close but then lost touch proves an advantage, allowing them to meet and skip all the intervening years and bad choices, the triumphs and letdowns, and exist only with and for each other, for however long it takes. Ingrid, after much hesitation, agrees and they set up house somewhere in upstate New York in a sleek, hypermodernist villa that opens onto a lush, bucolic setting. The only intrusion on their solitude is the presence, at first as merely a reference, of Martha’s estranged adult daughter. She was conceived in a brief sentimental moment with a returning Vietnam vet who left immediately, wanting no part in the child’s life. Still, Martha was by her own admission a derelict mother. John Turturro provides a welcome breath of ornery air as a climate expert and speaker known to both women, who is in the neighborhood for a professional commitment, and provides Moore’s Ingrid with companionable moments and an outsider’s perspective.

But mostly we are within the subtly shifting emotions of a pas de deux—a dance of such delicacy, such nuanced progression, from near-enmity to comradeliness to empathy and love, that from a distance one might suspect that nothing at all is going on. That was certainly the impression given by some critics at Venice, who expressed surprise at Almodóvar’s stately pacing and somber mood, calling the film stilted or deliberately actorish. But a great deal is going on, in what is ultimately a tour de force of mind and emotion rather than physical action.

Two women isolated from the world—one can’t help but think of Persona (1966). But the transference in that film was between a (relatively) strong woman and a (relatively) weak one, whereas these two begin with solid identities and, through imagining themselves in each other’s minds and bodies, become more fully and firmly who they already were. Swinton’s Martha preserves her dignity and determination while trying to enjoy her limited time with her friend and also make the outcome safe for her. Ingrid, in one of the most gently graded performances of Moore’s astonishing career, comes to involve herself mentally and emotionally, and grows to believe in what her friend is doing. You see it in her eyes and in her speech, which becomes firmer, just as Martha’s fierce façade—she has had to maintain it—gradually deliquesces into something softer.

Molly Haskell has written for many publications, including The Village Voice, The New York Times, Ms., Saturday Review, and Vogue. She is the author of Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films and From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies.