Next Door
Daniel Brühl’s directorial debut casts the actor as a film star rather full of himself.
Brühl in Berlin
Here’s another film starring Daniel Brühl, but this time around the established star directs as well. As a debut, it’s a promising start for he shows real skill in utilising the ’Scope format. He does so unobtrusively, yet it all helps to make properly cinematic a film that largely takes place in a single setting, a milk bar in Berlin. Even though the screenplay by the novelist and playwright Daniel Kehlmann is a screen original, the piece could easily have felt stagey, but that is avoided. As for the set-up, Next Door does have a number of supporting characters and they include the barkeeper, Hilde, very nicely played by Rike Eckermann. Yet, regardless of that, the film feels close to being a two-hander, and that’s because two figures dominate. One is a film star called Daniel played by Brühl himself and the other is Bruno, an East Berliner unsettlingly encountered by Daniel in that bar on the very day when he is due to fly to London for a casting call for a role in a franchise movie. The role of Bruno is taken by Peter Kurth and he is not an actor known to me but he walks away with the film.
The character of Next Door is not easy to define. I’ve seen it described as a black comedy but that doesn’t quite do it. It’s a piece built entirely round the dialogue that ensues between Daniel and Bruno. Being a popular star (and doesn’t he know it), the preening Daniel is used to being addressed by strangers who want to praise his work or ask for an autograph, but Bruno has other intentions. Starting off by criticising Daniel’s acting skills and condemning a film that he has made about the Stasi, Bruno’s talk becomes ever more pointed and linked to Daniel’s private life. He reveals that he lives in the same apartment block as Daniel which stands in an area now gentrified and he claims that his late father had actually occupied the apartment that now houses Daniel. But that had been before his father had been viciously pressurised by a developer to get out so that he could turn it into the far more luxurious abode acquired by Daniel. And then, as the conversation in the bar continues, Bruno proves to have information about both Daniel and his wife, Clara (Aenne Schwarz): hints about their personal lives include the suggestion that Clara is secretly having an affair with the director who had played a pivotal role in Daniel’s film career and Bruno has compromising details about Daniel too.
In so far as Next Door is concerned with the world of filmmaking, there is certainly an element of satire in its approach and that goes beyond the fact that Daniel Brühl is portraying a decidedly vain and self-centred actor with whom he shares his own first name. It’s obviously not by chance that the film’s Daniel, who might have been taking on the role of Beethoven in a serious movie, is instead going for the money by seeking to be cast in a big English-language franchise that echoes Brühl’s own involvement in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. There’s humour too in the way that the storyline of this addition to the franchise is so secret that even Daniel can’t get details of it relevant to the role he would be playing. But that mode is not maintained even though we are initially invited to relish the comments by Bruno and to find them entertaining. The tone alters as we gradually realise that this stranger is more or less akin to a stalker and somebody who intends to bring Daniel down.
If the dialogue is pointed and sharp, the screenplay is also adroit in finding convincing developments in what Bruno is saying to make it convincing that Daniel should more than once set out to leave the bar en route for the airport and then fail to go. But, if Bruno appeals to the viewer by being disturbing in an intriguing way, the increasingly dramatic tone of the story really requires Daniel to emerge as a character about whom we care. For all his faults he needs to earn some sympathy as his underlying vulnerability becomes apparent. That is necessary if the film is to satisfy, but it is undermined by the extent to which any viewer who admires Brühl will feel the need to distance the actor from the character he is playing in spite of the deliberate personal echoes contained in the film. To make that disassociation clear, I for one honed in on disliking the fictional Daniel and the consequence is that one feels no sympathy whatever for this character. The longer the film goes on the more this disrupts its effectiveness.
Original title: Nebenan.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Daniel Brühl, Peter Kurth, Rike Eckermann, Aenne Schwarz, Justine Hirschfeld, Gode Benedix, Mex Schlüpfer, Stefan Scheumann, Ole Hermann, Vicky Krieps.
Dir Daniel Brühl, Pro Daniel Brühl and Malte Grunert, Screenplay Daniel Kehlmann, Ph Jens Harant, Pro Des Susanne Hopf, Ed Marty Schenk, Music Moritz Friedrich and Jakob Grünert, Costumes Lisy Christi.
Amusement Park Films/Warner Bros. Productions Germany/Gretchenfilm/Erfftal Film-Curzon.
92 mins. Germany. 2021. Rel: 1 October 2021. No Cert.