Look, I know we have been spending rather more time than usual looking at movies from 2005 these last few months, particularly those of the horror and thriller persuasion. And, much as I would love to promise you something else, I have once again come to you with another piece of unsettling cinema from twenty years ago, this time in the form of Naboer (Next Door in English).
We pick up at the end of a relationship, as the utterly normal John (Kristoffer Joner) and his long-term girlfriend bring their cohabitation to a close after a messy break-up. In some ways, the story starts where plenty others would end, an epilogue to the doomed romance between John and his ex and the painful mundanity that follows the loss of that kind of love.
But, of course, things are not entirely as they seem, as John encounters two previously-unknown neighbours – Anne (Cecilie Mosili) and Kim (Julia Schacht), who draw him in to a series of bizarre sexually-charged encounters that reveal the depths of John’s psyche.
Naboer is one of those movies that feels more than a character study than anything else; a small-scale drama drenched in woozy imagery and evasive scenes that hardly seem to match from one moment to the next. Which, in the wrong hands, is the kind of thing that very quickly becomes irritating – at the end of the day, I come to movies because I want to be told a story, and films that go out of their way to dodge that generally do little more than piss me off (case in point).
A good thing, then, that writer-director Pål Sletaune knows exactly how to frame this story to make it stick. This is pure psychological deconstruction, a collection of vignettes that unravel the truth behind John’s recent break-up and his view of women, sex, and desire as a whole.
Shame is the throughline that ties it all together – Sletaune uses the camera as another voyeuristic eye on John’s life, pulling the audience into the role of the observer that John has struggled so much with. It’s an engrossing and often labyrinthine story, flashes of horror tangled amongst the psychosexual deconstruction of this, apparently, utterly normal guy.
I won’t ruin the actual climax of Naboer for you – if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s well worth going in relatively cold to see this story unfold in real time. But I can promise you that Naboer makes for one of the oddest and most compelling character studies I’ve ever seen in film, and, if you have seen it, I would love to know what you make of it in the comments below!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via No Real Danger)
No But Listen 