Naboer (aka. Next Door, aka. La Otra Puerta) (Pål Sletaune, 2005)
It’s not that often that I get to review a Norwegian movie, and especially not a Norwegian psycho-thriller with horror elements, reminiscent of Polanski and Lynch. Naboer is that film, which finally found its way to Mexican theaters, and surprisingly, it was a quite pleasant experience. By pleasant, I of course mean unpleasant, but in a good way.
The plot is rather simple: John lives alone after his girlfriend left him, and bumps into his next-door neighbours, two young women. They are acting… strangely, and seem to know things more about him than they should. Things go rapidly downhill from there. It’s not the sort of movie you can explain too much without giving it all away (although the truth wasn’t too hard to figure out about halfway through anyway).
It’s not particularly original, I have to say, and it’s very fair to compare it to and consider it inspired by movies like The Tenant, The Machinist, Spider, and Lost Highway, but it’s quite well done, and it works. Visually it’s also quite nice, all muted tones and old, worn-down Eastern Oslo apartment building interiors, second-hand sixties furniture, and a thin layer of grime on everything. I was also amazed by the incredibly fractured space in the movie, you literally don’t know how things in these big, old, cluttered apartments connect and relate to each other, and that’s kind of the point. It’s done subtly, though, not the jarring cuts that breaking basic rules of cinematography would imply, and it gives you a sense of being lost and paranoid, just like the lead character.
The acting’s a bit uneven, Kristoffer Joner, perhaps the finest actor in Norwegian cinema today, does a great job, while some of the others put in a somewhat less convincing performance. But none of it’s too bad, and if you don’t know Norwegian, and you watch the movie subtitled, it probably won’t bother you at all.
Oh, and there’s an amazing sex scene. I know people have reacted strongly to it, but I thought it was amazing, an incredibly visceral mix of sex, violence, blood, and base instinct, with a raw urgency and credibility to it. And so very sexy, the sort of thing you get excited by despite yourself, similar to some of the stuff in Crash. Actually, thinking about inspirations and influences for this movie, I think Sletaune is definitely in the same idea space as recent Cronenberg, the general concept reminded me of Spider, while the sex scene made me think of both Crash and A History of Violence.
If you like psycho-thrillers, violent sex and nice visuals, well tied together although perhaps not incredibly original, you should definitely take a look.