Next Door (2005)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Next door |
| Original title | Naboer |
| Country of production | Norway , Sweden , Denmark |
| original language | Norwegian |
| Publishing year | 2005 |
| length | 75 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 18 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Pål Sletaune |
| script | Pål Sletaune |
| production | Pål Sletaune |
| music | Simon Boswell |
| camera | John Andreas Andersen |
| cut | Darek Hodor |
| occupation | |
| |
Next Door (original title: Naboer) is a Norwegian psychological thriller with mystery elements from 2005 . Directed by Pål Sletaune , Kristoffer Joner plays a man who is dragged into a world full of sexual violence by two women.
action
John has lived alone since his ex-girlfriend Ingrid left him. When she comes to his apartment to pick up some things, she tells him that she's talking about everything to her new partner, Åke. Åke is also waiting outside to take care of Ingrid.
When John later comes home from work, the attractive neighbor Anne approaches him in the hallway and asks him to slide a cupboard from the inside in front of the apartment door. In the neighboring apartment, the man then meets the equally attractive Kim. Both women know his name and invite him for a drink. They talk about how different people are and that they need to protect themselves from a man who could ambush them. When John is about to leave, they reveal that they know everything about his breakup with Ingrid because they supposedly heard it through the wall between the two apartments. John is surprised because the other way round, the walls were never clairaudient to him. In his apartment he thinks about Ingrid.
Then Anne rings his doorbell and asks him to take care of Kim while she goes to the pharmacy herself. When John initially refuses, Anne says that her sister was once brutally attacked by John's previous tenant and has not left the apartment since. The perpetrator was reported at the time, but not convicted. John agrees to go back to the neighboring apartment.
Kim, who plays loud music, claims that she is not Anne's sister and that the robbery did not take place either. In a very messy room of the apartment, John follows a phone ring. Kim answers and asks about the pain of the breakup while he has to reassure her that he is not angry. Then John finds Kim in another room where she is sitting on a sofa, lightly dressed. She tells him that Anne once had sex with several men and claims that it also arouses John. She also explains in detail how she once had sex with three men, and then describes it as a made-up story. Then she hits John several times in the face and begins wild sex with him, in which both punch each other so hard that they bleed. John desperate when he wipes off the blood in the bathroom.
The next day, his colleague Peter speaks to him in the architecture office about the marks on his face. John doesn't want to talk about it and prefers to distract himself with extra work. At home, by calling information, he finds out that there is no other telephone connection on his floor. After packing away a bloody towel, he leaves Ingrid a message on the phone, apologizing for his behavior. While he is sitting at the table without appetite, he remembers the last conversation with Ingrid in his apartment. His ex-partner showed him a burn that was caused by John pouring hot coffee on her arm. She said that Åke had made it clear to her that it was not an accident, because John was obviously aroused by it and had sex with Ingrid for the first time in half a year. On the way out, she also told the same group sex story John heard from Kim.
John goes next door again to ask Anne why, unlike the two women, he can't hear anything through the wall between the two apartments. Anne locks him in the back of the apartment, where he thinks she sees another man and meets Kim again. She explains to him that he did not need to hit her. As the stronger, he could have just held onto her. Then John sees Anne having a similar conversation with an unknown man as Kim does with him, until the man beats Anne. When he notices John, he introduces himself as Åke. He talks about his relationship with Ingrid before giving John the key to a connecting door. But John's escape ends at another door and now Åke becomes aggressive when he mentions the scene with the coffee on Ingrid's arm and asks if Ingrid is into violent sex. Anne comes in and tells John to remember that he killed Ingrid. He sees some of his items in the apartment. Anne urges him to go into the bedroom. There he discovers Ingrid's bruised corpse under a blanket.
John stumbles back into his apartment in panic and barricades the door from the inside. In the bathroom he sees a photo of Kim that he has looked at before. Then he hears screams from the hallway. He goes to the door and is surprised to find that the hallway ends with a wall where he last walked to the neighboring apartment several times. When Peter comes to him to bring some documents from the office, there is a hole in this wall. John is hitting the wall behind the two young women’s apartment with a hammer. After some confused talk, he sends his colleague away and barricades the door even more. Then he remembers killing Åke in his apartment and sees his body in the bathroom. He also remembers how he strangled Ingrid in the hallway after she had picked up her things from him. Peter tries to get into the apartment with reinforcements. John lies down in bed and hugs Ingrid's body.
production
The shooting took place from June 8th to July 20th, 2004 in Norway.
background
The film is one of the few Norwegian productions that received a rating of 18 and over from the film rating there. This was previously the case at Hotel St. Pauli from 1988. Director Pål Sletaune named Alfred Hitchcock as inspiration and let the music from his work Psycho play on set during filming.
reception
The reviews are very different. Jean Lüdecke describes the film on film-zeit.de as a “ Kafkaesque symbiosis of Roman Polański and David Lynch ”. He sees it as a "psychological thriller for adults, disturbing, sexist, frightening and salted with a good pinch of black humor". However, the director drives "fun games and lively guesswork too far" and offers an excess of "Blood, Sex and Crime". The reviewer from film-tipps.at praised the locations that were captured "very claustrophobic [...] and very effectively". "In addition, there is a narrative style that plays a tricky game with different levels of reality". For the editor of cinema.de, the film is a “hypnotically captivating S / M grumpy from the far north”. Christoph Petersen, on the other hand, comes to a negative assessment at filmstarts.de. He criticizes the in his opinion weak script and the predictable plot. He also makes a comparison with David Cronenberg and says: “The progressive approach to this difficult topic and the staid Tatort staging just don't go together - it just seems ridiculous and in no way disturbing when John and Kim fuck each other hit each other's faces. "
Awards
Leading actor Kristoffer Joner was awarded the Norwegian Film Prize Amanda for best leading actor in 2005. Christian Schaanning was awarded the Canon Prize for sound design at the Kosmorama International Film Festival in Trondheim in 2006.
Web links
- Next Door in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Next Door in the online film database
Individual evidence
- ↑ Release certificate for Next Door . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry (PDF).
- ^ Filming & Production. IMDb, accessed on April 13, 2020 .
- ↑ Trivia. IMDb, accessed on April 13, 2020 .
- ↑ Trivia. IMDb, accessed on April 13, 2020 .
- ^ Jean Lüdecke: Next Door. film-zeit.de, accessed on April 13, 2020 .
- ^ Next Door. filmtipps.at, accessed on April 13, 2020 .
- ^ Next Door. cinema.de, accessed on April 13, 2020 .
- ^ Christoph Petersen: Next Door. filmstarts.de, accessed on April 13, 2020 .
- ↑ a b Awards. IMDb, accessed on April 13, 2020 .