Films that are straightforwardly about death are rare, but movies that are about both death and sex are rarer, still.

In Pedro Almodóvar's "The Room Next Door," the Spanish director's first English-language feature film, Julianne Moore plays Ingrid, a celebrated author who's just written a book about death. She's at a book signing in New York when she hears that an old friend, a war correspondent named Martha Hunt ( Tilda Swinton ), has been diagnosed with cancer.

Ingrid rushes to Martha in the hospital, and the two friends, who haven't seen each other in years, quickly get reacquainted. Soon, Martha's cancer worsens and she asks Ingrid to assist her in self-euthanasia. "The cancer can't get me if I get the cancer first," she says.

Why not ask someone she's closer with? Well, she has, Martha says, but for various reasons none of them are willing. With an illegal pill bought from, as she says, "the dark web" and a slight conspiratorial vibe that they're committing a crime together, they travel to a modernist house in upstate New York where Martha plans to end her life. She'll be comforted, she believes, having Ingrid just down the hall. Martha doesn't want any fuss, just a nice time. "As if we were on vacation," she says.

"The Room Next Door," the title of which plays off Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," is about finding dignity and contentment with death as a natural part of life, and, perhaps, the mystery of the relationships that end up mattering the most. The one thing Martha and Ingrid share is a former lover (played by John Turturro ), who turns up again in clandestine meetings with Ingrid. He's preoccupied with environmental disaster and the death of the planet, but fondly recalls sleeping with Martha as "like having sex... Read More