It’s always interesting to see what an actor will deliver as they make the step towards directing, and for “Next Door” director and star Daniel Brühl has not shied away from a premise that closely parallels, yet distorts, his own life. It’s a film that explores a space of conversation highlighted to great effect in Bong Joon-ho’s recent towering success, “Parasite,” toying with societal dichotomies and opening up discussions around wealth, class, gentrification, and spatial divides. But where “Parasite” was ominously slick and raucous, “Next Door” is muted and stifled.
A Spanish-German actor named Daniel exists in a world of wealth and polish, his Berlin apartment complete with a glass-fronted balcony and its own personal elevator. We understand his lifestyle through a series of flat-lay shots – his fruit and granola bowl placed with precision next to a freshly brewed espresso on a small tray, his hard case suitcase lying open and filled in neat, orderly sections. Stopping in his local bar en route to an audition he meets Bruno, a man intent on destroying the manicured life Daniel has created for himself.
To enact Daniel’s downfall and exert some control over his own life, Bruno has collected a wealth of damning information about Daniel and his wife – their bank statements, evidence of their affairs, pornography collections – which seems like prime fodder for a high-stakes drama. Instead, Brühl settles for a chamber piece, where the action unfolds only through dialogue and heightened conversations. It’s not convincingly the correct choice either; could there have been a middle ground to be found between thriller antics and this staid, monologue-driven film?
Despite this, “Next Door” is a film that builds its characters effectively. In an early scene, a child’s soft toy tumbles down the stairs behind Daniel as he rehearses his lines. He ignores it until a woman tiptoes after it and accidentally activates one of its musical modes. It feels like an insignificant moment as the film goes on, but it instigates a kind of wary admiration for Daniel at first. Does his perfectionist exterior life mean he will snap at this woman, curse her for interrupting his work? Or is he kinder than the cold modernity of his life might suggest?
When the cracks do begin to show, they soon fissure deeply. Bruno begins to throw verbal punches; criticisms of Daniel’s performance in a film about the Stasi descend into much more revealing dissections of his personal life. Bruno may be a stranger to Daniel, but Daniel is no stranger to Bruno. In fact, they are neighbors, but Daniel in his high tower would never have noticed the man who looks after his parcel deliveries when he’s not home or who witnesses the obnoxious ease with which he can live his life. The film offers an interesting examination of privilege in the public eye and how that can infiltrate local spaces of community, the script offering some moments of real clarity and insight into their battling psyches.
The successes of the film lay most clearly in the casting of the brilliant Peter Kurth as Bruno, a stoic and calculating screen presence who hovers so convincingly on the border between gentle giant and imminent threat. He is a man who has been overlooked in life, losing out as the West and East sides of Berlin reunified and gentrification swept the city, and he is reminded of the struggles that befell his family every day as he watches Daniel’s wealth and success play out from his own window. Kurth is controlled and concise, undermining his target with relaxed precision. A more frustrating casting decision is that, although named in the opening credits, “Phantom Thread” star Vicky Krieps makes barely a two-minute appearance at the film’s close, more of a cameo it seems, than a role.
“Next Door” examines a difficult but engaging arena of discussion between the two men on their own sides of a new division in Berlin, but perhaps more could have been achieved if the film was not left to rely merely on lengthy dialogue and one central location to carry its drama. Brühl works confidently as a director and star, however, hopefully with the potential to be a little more ambitious in the future. [C]
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