Interior

 

Whoever looks too much at others eventually ceases to see themselves.
— Friedrich Nietzsche 

The starting point of Interior is, one must admit, remarkable: a sofa as a Trojan horse. A domestic object turned into a device of intrusion, an interior containing another interior, someone observing while pretending not to exist. 

It is an idea that promises a great deal. Perhaps too much. 

Because the film by Pascal Schuh seems built around a brilliant intuition that, scene after scene, is handled with a certain logical carelessness—to put it mildly. The sofa mechanism works only until one asks the first practical question. And unfortunately, the viewer eventually does. 

From that point on, the film proceeds as if credibility were an optional detail. The intrusions follow one another with almost comic ease, the reactions of the “observed” oscillate between nonexistent and theatrically implausible, and the entire scientific framework—this study of emotions—appears to be grounded more in a vague suggestion than in any coherent line of thought. 

Interior stages a narrative device that aspires to be disturbing and conceptual, yet from the outset reveals a certain fragility: what should be a reflection on voyeurism, emotion, and control turns into an uneven trajectory, where the idea remains consistently more convincing than its execution. 

Dr. Liebermann, theoretically the central figure, embodies perhaps the most evident failure: a scientist who wants to “learn to feel” by watching clandestine videotapes. The idea, already fragile, is pursued with such seriousness that it unintentionally borders on the comic. Not because it is absurd—cinema can allow anything—but because it is never truly questioned. It is simply taken for granted. And here the film demands an act of faith it has not earned. 

The result is paradoxical: a film about observation that does not truly observe, a film that claims to analyze emotions yet fails to construct even a single convincing one. 

And yet, something remains. 

Not in the “scientific” dimension—which is, frankly, little more than a shaky pretext—but in the pathological one. The relationship between Kasimir and Liebermann quickly ceases to be an experiment and reveals itself for what it is: a disturbed dynamic of submission and power, a desperate need to be seen (or to control) disguised as research. 

Here the film becomes, almost unintentionally, more interesting. Not when it tries to explain, but when it allows a form of existential paranoia to surface: an obsession with the other not as an object of knowledge, but as a territory to be occupied. Not to understand, but to fill a void. 

The problem is that this thread—the most unsettling, the most fertile—is constantly suffocated by a screenplay that stumbles over itself. Scenes that should generate tension end up producing unintentional laughter, crucial moments resolve themselves arbitrarily, and some sequences (especially the more “extreme” ones) oscillate precariously between the disturbing and the ridiculous. 

There is something almost ironic in all this: a film that aims to study the emotions of others and ultimately fails to control even its own. 

In the end, Interior remains a curious object. A strong idea inserted into a limping, imprecise narrative structure that is, at times, unintentionally comic. 

As if the real experiment were not Dr. Liebermann’s, but the film’s itself: to determine how far credibility can be stretched before the viewer stops believing. 

And here, the answer arrives rather quickly. 

Every form of power is a form of dependence.
— Jean Baudrillard