There’s a persistent note of inconsequential silliness to this film, set mostly in a scuzzy bar. It is written for the screen by the German novelist and dramatist Daniel Kehlmann and directed by its lead actor, Daniel Brühl, who features as an ironised version of himself, a self-involved movie star who is living the dream in a gorgeous modern apartment in Berlin with his partner and two young children.
One morning, Brühl is heading off to London to do a casting session for a superhero movie which, though undoubtedly absurd, will clearly be very lucrative. But he realises he has set off too early, so he dismisses his driver and whiles away a few hours in a near-deserted pub, where a grumpy local, Bruno (Peter Kurth), happens to be slumped at the bar. Striking up a conversation, Bruno disquietingly reveals that he knows a great deal about Daniel Brühl. He lambasts him about what he sees as the specious and naive quality of his breakthrough movie, “Good Bye Lenin!” from 2003, the one where Brühl plays a young guy whose earnestly communist East Berliner mother awakens from a coma not realising the wall has fallen, and her son has to protect her from the truth. That, jeers Bruno, is pure Wessi Romantik – West Berliner romanticism. Is this Kehlmann speaking, actually? Then he reveals that Brühl’s luxurious flat once belonged to his father, who was more or less evicted by an unscrupulous gentrifying developer and furthermore makes it clear that he knows a great deal more about Brühl’s personal life because he is his neighbour in the grimly undeveloped block just over the way.
An amusing, accomplished debut on its own modest terms, “Next Door” works best as tart meta-comedy, becoming increasingly cramped in scope and setting as it spirals into an obsessive revenge thriller. Fans of the actor will enjoy spotting the parallels to his own career, with a Stasi film that corresponds to Brühl’s homegrown breakout hit “Good Bye Lenin!”, a period detective series that sounds a lot like “The Alienist” and an all-important screen test to play a villain, not unlike Zemo, the antagonist in “Captain America: Civil War” and the Disney+ series, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”. That should ease the way into streaming exposure for this embellished two-hander.
Even the character’s name and German-Spanish nationality are the same, but rather than make the fictional Daniel a monstrous caricature, he’s a realistically heightened version of Brühl. His vanity and smug assumption of being able to get whatever he wants with his good looks and silver-tongued charm (he calls it his “Danny Boy touch”) are just obnoxious enough to provide some schadenfreude when he’s served his comeuppance. He’s also a neat freak — shown in the perfect arrangement of fruit and granola on his breakfast tray or the precision packing of his travel bag — which gives extra sting to the merciless unravelling of his life over the course of a single afternoon. Daniel comes off as the man Brühl is desperately afraid of being mistaken for, or maybe even the man Brühl worries he’s just a few small missteps away from becoming. He’s nice to all of the people on his payroll, he plays with his kids when it’s convenient, and he never turns down a selfie request on the street, but Daniel only gives enough of himself that he doesn’t have to worry about what he takes in return. When he asks his housekeeper “What would we do without you?” it’s clearly a rhetorical question; if Conchita offered an actual response he’d look at her like she’d broken the fourth wall.
There’s no faulting the performances, and Brühl has surrounded himself with a top-notch crew, so “Next Door” has impressive visual vitality for a story stuck predominantly in a single setting. To some extent, this film is about the geopolitical implications of the gentrification that Berlin has experienced since 1989; it’s about the Berlin Wall of inequality that separates rich and poor. It’s also about celebrities and acting. There’s a witty touch about how very good Brühl is at the mysterious actorly art of crying real tears. The film skates over these ideas and lines of stagey dialogue rattle back and forth. It’s not a vanity project. Brühl does not seem in the least vain, but an actor’s project, nonetheless. The screenplay by prestigious German writer Daniel Kehlmann, based on an idea by Brühl, works hard to keep Danny Boy in the bar well past the time when most people would have made a hasty exit — not to mention that he has a plane to catch. This starts to feel forced as Daniel tries to paper over the animosity with his “not my fault” justifications and even sticks around to hear Bruno’s acting advice for his audition. For a film running just over 90 minutes, the midsection grows stretched and repetitive, its verbal sparring too transparently serving as a delaying tactic until the real ammunition comes out.
Daniel Brühl, for his part, directs proceedings with enough sleek, nippy aplomb to make you wonder what he could do with a less self-oriented, bigger-picture script: An oblique, eerie finale, in which a cameoing Vicky Krieps displaces Daniel in the very space he has hitherto occupied, is suddenly more intriguing than anything else in the film. By the end of “Next Door,” you sense Brühl growing a little weary of his own screen presence — the clearest suggestion in this odd, hall-of-mirrors curio that he and the film’s “Daniel” are not quite one and the same. Daniel Brühl deserves credit for attempting a tricky tonal balance, and for refusing to invite sympathy for his actor alter ego. But that ultimately saddles the dark comedy with two main characters who have both become irksome and a little tedious by the end. A late cameo by “Phantom Thread” star Vicky Krieps, hinting at a fresh target with more trouble to come, doesn’t make the closing note any more satisfying.
OFF SCREEN 