Daniel Brühl is not just a versatile actor (having appeared in such diverse roles as Alex Kerner in the festival hit Good Bye, Lenin! or Niki Lauda in the biographical drama Rush); he is also a talented director, as he showed with his debut Next Door. He also played one of the film’s main characters, bringing a wonderful sense of self-irony to the role of Daniel – an actor whose life is going great until he enters a small bar and meets the disillusioned Bruno. Bruno decides to take out on Daniel his anger about all the things that bother him, from German reunification to the gentrification of Berlin. An occasionally funny, occasionally chilling comedy founded on carefully written dialogue, Next Door premiered in competition at the 2021 Berlinale.