Next Door

'If only my seduction skills were better...'

Next Door, reportedly one of Norway's highest-grossing films of 2005, wears its Hitchcockian influence on its sleeve, attempting to be a Rear Window-Vertigo-Psycho blend updated with considerable gloss to an upclass apartment complete with high-ceilings, well-spaced classy furniture, and, of course, moody yuppies. Comparisons aside, however, its Hitchcockian elements stop there as it puts on its serious 'mindfuck' mode, hoping to please today's cynical audience of twist endings and satisfactory explanations. All it ends up with is a thick, muddled alphabet soup tediously explaining the pieces laid behind that has already been made painfully obvious to the viewer earlier - think David Lynch with an irritatingly intrusive running commentary explaining all the incongruities.

A huge pity actually, considering the first half could actually turn out to be an interesting exercise and dissection in the truthfulness of cinema and the manipulation behind editing, all pieced behind a vampiristic tale of sexual manipulation and conquest. It leaves many fill-in-the-spaces gaps in between, but only proceeds to shove its pieces back into these gaps one by one, which leads me to wonder if the writer/director thinks that the audience is that stupid, or if he's merely showing off his art director's credos by droning on overly lengthy (and not particularly well-written or interesting) explanations to a too-simple premise. It would've been interesting had it been made as a 20-minute short film. As an already brief 75-minute feature, it only feels 55 minutes too long.