Interior had its world première at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, 13 Nov 2025
Pascal Schuh’s feature debut Interior begins with a yellow sofa sitting in the middle of a concrete-clad room, as brutalist as a bunker. Parts of the sofa’s seat are lifted up from the inside to reveal, curled up within its base, Kasimir (Daniil Kramkin) who emerges like a baby from his mother’s womb. Not quite as naked as newborn, however, Kasimir is rather dressed only in underwear, armed with a digicam, and very much a full adult. As he sneaks around the shadowy corridors of this modernist, minimalist home, he sees Dr Liebermann (Knut Berger) pulling up in the driveway.
Kasimir lives only for Dr Liebermann – but they make for a very odd couple. The doctor insists upon exacting standards, fixed diets and ritualised behaviours that prove hard for anyone to maintain for very long, and he shows his own love, or indeed any feelings, barely if at all. He is a highly skilled neurologist who literally saves lives – but he also lacks affect, to the point of psychopathy, and has a sadistic streak to boot. What is more, he occasionally performs covert experimental surgeries on his own property, not unlike the doctor from Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face (1960). He also has some very peculiar private side projects on the boil – which is where the man-hiding sofa and Kasimir’s camera come in.
Liebermann sends Kasimir, who suffers from mutism as a mark of his own damage, on strange missions. Kasimir infiltrates ordinary people’s homes via the sofa, sets up hidden cameras everywhere and at night comes out himself to film – all so that, once the sofa has been recovered via an elaborate ruse, Kasimir and Liebermann can settle down in front of their meticulously prepared, portion-controlled TV dinners and watch the video files that Kasimir has made.
Like an updated version of the disturbed protagonist of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), Liebermann likes to watch, vicariously observing the hidden dynamics and dysfunction in normal-seeming families, and arrogating to himself the rôle of all-seeing, strictly non-interventionist god – which is why he gets angry any and every time Kasimir shows signs of becoming emotionally involved with his unwitting hosts. Kasimir longs for any kind of affection, and especially the slightest hint of it from Liebermann, which is why the young man has allowed himself to become caught up in this dangerous game, and to follow all Liebermann’s bizarre, sometimes cruel demands. Here, though, love is controlled, closeted and suppressed – and cannot last forever.
Interior initially evokes Kim Ki-duk’s 3-Iron (2004), Jaume Balagueró’s Sleep Tight (2011), Dominic Bridges’ Freehold (2017), Axel Muñoz’s Lonesome Collectors (Noches de Julio, 2018), Adam Randall’s I See You (2019) or Jill Gevargizian’s Ghost Game (2024), or even like Edogawa Ranpo’s short story The Human Chair (1925). For it sets itself up to be about an interloper who phrogs his way, mostly undetected, into other people’s lives to make up for what is missing in his own. Yet this is as much about Liebermann as Kasimir, and as it begins to anatomise the doctor’s needs and to offer a probing look inside his mind, it goes to some truly unhinged and unexpected places all its own.
There are wild digressions to karaoke, brain surgery, dancing, big cats and unsettling fantasies – all diffracted through a variety of media to show us this most self-controlled and repressed man’s own unbalanced interiority. The results are unpredictable, surreal, deeply discomfiting and ultimately tragic, as Liebermann proves to be a man trapped, perhaps like all of us, within his own psychological furnishings. Yet as Interior gets us too watching and judging its recorded, on-screen narrative from our own aloof distance, it leaves us to wonder how different we really are from Liebermann (or at least from Kasimir), and what fixations, compulsions and addictions might be lurking inside us.
strap: Pascal Schuh’s surreal psychothriller has an odd couple infiltrating other people’s lives to find what is missing in their own
© Anton Bitel
