Next Door

This was wonderful. Gradually growing tension, garnished with comic touches, and played to perfection by the two male leads.

A smooth and successful young actor is to fly from his Berlin home to Britain to audition for a superhero movie. His only frustration at that point is getting hold of the script. His taxi to the airport arrives too soon, so he sends it off and thinks to fill in time with a drink at the local bar. There he encounters another inhabitant of his block of flats. He treats their discussion with tactful reserve, as a fleeting encounter with an unimportant man. But the conversation proves quite sticky. His frustrations grow, tension deepens.

Almost the entire film takes place in the bar, giving it the feel of a stage play. And almost all the dialogue is between the two men, though there are important scenes involving his wife and the woman who owns the bar.

The backdrop is gentrification, with the two protagonists representing a clash between the old and the new. Looming over all is the shadow of the past: the Stalinist regime in Eastern Germany.

I would be happy to watch this again.

I would describe this as a drama and the performances of every actor are brilliant. They bounce of each other and the dialogue flows. This must be the best drama created during lockdown times that I have seen. Bruhl, as ever, has done an excellent job.

I did not know anything about this movie when I watched it on Netflix.

I suggest you dive right in.

This movie , directed and starring Daniel Brühl, with Peter Kurth as "the other guy" centers around an actor named Daniel who just wants to read the only page of a script he got for an audition, hence entering a pub for a coffee before taking his flight.

What unfolds is one of the best German movies I have seen in a long time.

Despite rarely leaving the premises, and playing in real time, this is veritable seat glue with brilliant dialogue and hard to guess twists and turns in the story.

Daniel Brühl got Daniel Kehlmann as the writer, who is also a novelist, and it shows in every detail.

Add to this a beautiful and effective cinematography and rare but masterful score/songs and we have ourselves a movie that will be shown in film making classes.

One can learn so much watching it.

I don't understand how this is not even rated a 7.0 on imdb.

You certainly won't be disappointed even when you go in with high expectations.

Well done, Daniel. Please make more movies. You are Germany's best talent.

While the main trailer for this film was quite impressive and promising, I must admit that the movie loses it's freshness due to the postmodern features.

And with that I principally mean the normalization of frighteningly strange story points. With that I mean the lack of an accurate representation on how someone normal would react to the things going on.

Daniel Brühl is brilliant, as he should be, but his character and the others do not react normally. This gives the movie an bizarre feeling. Because the sense of being appalled is not properly shown.

From a filmmaking point of view this film is solid, but it just fails because of postmodernism.

I can not imagine how much time and thinking needs to go into such a movie. There is not a lot happening, besides a couple people talking. And still, you feel the tension in every frame. Plus nothing feels forced or scripted. The pacing is just on point.

I am happy that his movie ended up being as good as it is. Hope he does more in the future.