Next Door

Next Door (Nebenan, 2021) is a German tragicomedy you can watch online on iFILM. It marks the directing debut of Daniel Brühl, who also stars as Daniel — a celebrated actor who seems to have it all: a loft in a fashionable Berlin neighborhood, a beautiful wife, a nanny minding the kids, and a flight to London for an American superhero audition.

Killing time before his cab, Daniel ducks into the unremarkable bar on his corner. A regular named Bruno is already there. Word by word, it becomes clear that Bruno knows far too much about the famous actor and has been waiting for this exact meeting for years. A man left behind by the gentrification of the old East Berlin, he has come to settle a score. Most of the film is simply two men talking in one room, a conversation that slowly hardens into a duel. Peter Kurth, as Bruno, quietly steals every scene.

The screenplay is by novelist Daniel Kehlmann, and language is the real weapon here: beneath the small talk lie envy, class resentment and the price of metropolitan success. The whole thing runs barely ninety minutes and rests entirely on two actors and razor-sharp dialogue. It's for viewers who like chamber pieces where tension builds out of words instead of car chases. Stream Next Door (2021) online on iFILM.