The Room Next Door (2024)

Ingrid, a novelist who has just published a book about her own fear of dying, learns that her old friend Martha is in a Manhattan hospital with cancer. The two had worked together at a magazine decades earlier, before Martha became a war correspondent. Visiting, Ingrid finds her lucid, funny and unsentimental, and hears the story of her life: a teenage pregnancy by a boyfriend who went to Vietnam and came back damaged, and a daughter, Michelle, estranged ever since. An experimental treatment for Martha's stage 3 cervical cancer seems promising, then fails. Martha reveals she has bought a euthanasia pill online and asks Ingrid to come with her to a rented modernist 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 arranged by their mutual former lover, Damian, defends her. Ingrid then contacts Michelle and brings her to the house.

Spoilers throughout. Discussing the cancer storyline means discussing how this ends.

This is the most medically and legally literate film on the list. It is accurate that an experimental trial can produce a real remission and then fail, and that the failure is what tips a patient from fighting to planning. Martha's reasoning is realistic: she is not depressed and not yet in unbearable pain, and she is acting while she still has the capacity to act, which matches the pattern reported by people who seek assisted death. The film is also precise about the legal exposure of a companion in a US state without an assisted-dying law, where being present is not a crime but procuring or administering the drug is, and that distinction is exactly what the police interview turns on. Almodóvar shows the bureaucratic aftermath and the suspicion, which most films skip entirely.

Martha stays elegant, articulate and physically capable until the day she dies, with her hair, wardrobe and appetite for conversation intact. Advanced cervical cancer that has stopped responding to treatment typically brings pelvic and lower-back pain, bleeding, leg swelling, kidney problems from obstructed ureters, and marked weakness, very little of which is shown. The route to the pill, ordered from the dark web and simply arriving, is also frictionless in a way reality is not. And the film says nothing about how Martha's cancer was found or whether she had ever been screened, a significant absence for this particular disease.

Cervical cancer is the one cancer on this list where screening is genuinely and powerfully effective, which is worth stating plainly. It is caused almost entirely by persistent infection with high-risk human papillomavirus, and screening finds pre-cancerous cell changes years before a cancer forms. NCI and USPSTF describe the same schedule: a Pap (cytology) test every three years from age 21 to 29; from 30 to 65, a primary HPV test every five years, now the preferred option, or HPV/Pap co-testing every five years, or a Pap alone every three years. Screening is not recommended before 21, and can usually stop after 65 for those adequately screened with normal results. USPSTF grades cervical screening A. HPV vaccination prevents most of the infections that cause it, but vaccinated people still need screening. Early cervical cancer usually causes no symptoms at all, which is precisely why screening matters. When symptoms do appear they include bleeding between periods, after sex or after menopause, unusual discharge, pelvic pain and pain during sex, and by then the cancer may already have begun to spread.

A film is not a diagnosis, and a dramatised illness is not a guide to your own. What a story like this is genuinely good for is lowering the barrier to a conversation you might otherwise put off.

If something in your body has changed and stayed changed for a few weeks, that is worth raising with a doctor — not because it is likely to be cancer, but because most of the time it will not be, and finding that out is the point. Where screening exists for a cancer, it is the one thing you can do before anything is wrong at all. See screening and possible warning signs.

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The Room Next Door is worth watching as a film. It is not a guide to the disease it portrays. The gap between the two is what this page is for — and the thing worth carrying away is that a change which persists is worth a conversation, whatever a story led you to expect.

This page describes a work of film or television for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care. Spotted an error? Please email [email protected].