The Room Next Door (2024)

Ingrid is a novelist who has just published a book about her own fear of dying. She learns that her old friend Martha is in a Manhattan hospital with cancer. They had worked together at a magazine decades earlier, before Martha became a war correspondent.

Visiting, Ingrid finds her lucid, funny and unsentimental. An experimental treatment for Martha's stage 3 cervical cancer looks promising, then fails.

Martha then reveals she has bought a euthanasia pill online. She asks Ingrid to come with her to a rented house in Woodstock, New York. Not to help her die, but to be in the room next door when she does. The signal will be a closed bedroom door. After one false alarm, Ingrid finds Martha dead on a lounger outside. A devoutly religious detective treats her as a suspect. A lawyer defends her. Ingrid then contacts Martha's estranged daughter, Michelle, and brings her to the house.

Spoilers throughout. Martha's death and everything that follows it are discussed on this page.

Most films skip the aftermath. This one builds its third act out of it. Ingrid is questioned by police, and suspicion falls on her as the survivor. This page does not give legal advice, and the law on assisted dying differs from place to place.

Martha is on a trial, and the film handles it well. A trial drug may help for a time and then stop working. If that happens, ask your team what options remain.

Her reasoning is also plausible. She is not depressed, not yet in unbearable pain, and she is acting while she still has the capacity to act.

Cervical cancer can be screened for, and the film says nothing about it.

The CDC says long-lasting infection with certain types of human papillomavirus, or HPV, is the main cause of cervical cancer. The CDC says the Pap test looks for precancers, cell changes that might become cancer if they are not treated.

The US Preventive Services Task Force gives cervical screening a grade A, its strongest rating.

The Task Force sets it out by age:

• Ages 21 to 29: cervical cytology, the Pap test, every three years.
• Ages 30 to 65: cytology alone every three years, or high-risk HPV testing alone every five years, or HPV testing and cytology together every five years.

It recommends against screening before 21. It recommends against continuing after 65 for women who have had adequate prior screening and are not otherwise at high risk. And it recommends against screening women who have had a hysterectomy that removed the cervix, unless they have a history of a high-grade precancerous lesion or of cervical cancer.

An update of this recommendation is in progress, so the schedule may change.

The CDC says HPV vaccines protect against types 16 and 18, which cause most HPV cancers. The vaccine does not cover every type, and it does not treat an infection someone already has. If you have been vaccinated, ask your care team how that fits with your screening schedule.

NCI says early cervical cancer usually does not cause symptoms. When they do appear, NCI lists bleeding after sex, bleeding after the menopause, bleeding between periods or heavier and longer periods, watery discharge with a strong odour or containing blood, and pelvic pain or pain during sex.

Advanced disease can add lower back pain, leg swelling, abdominal pain, fatigue, and bowel or urinary problems such as painful movements, rectal bleeding, painful urination or blood in the urine. These can have other causes. Get them checked.

Martha stays elegant, articulate and physically capable until the day she dies. Her hair, her wardrobe and her appetite for conversation are all intact.

Advanced cervical cancer often looks different. NCI lists lower back pain, leg swelling, abdominal pain, fatigue and bowel or urinary problems. Very little of that reaches the screen.

Nothing is ever said about how Martha's cancer was found, or whether she had ever been screened.

This page is free to read and always will be, with no adverts and nothing for sale. If the cervical screening schedule was useful, you can help keep it that way. Support our work.

The Room Next Door is focused on choice and its aftermath and vague about the body.

The gap it leaves is the important one. Cervical cancer is one cancer where screening looks for precancers before they turn into cancer. A film about a woman with it never mentions that.

• https://www.uspreventiveservicestaskforce.org/uspstf/recommendation/cervical-cancer-screening
• https://www.cancer.gov/types/cervical/symptoms
• https://www.cdc.gov/cervical-cancer/about/index.html
• https://www.cdc.gov/cervical-cancer/screening/index.html
• https://www.cdc.gov/hpv/vaccines/index.html

This page discusses The Room Next Door for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care. Spotted an error? Please email corrections@cancerexplained.org.