EIFF 78: A Story of Two Neighbours by Pascal Cicchetti

Films that deal directly with so-called post-internet culture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Internet) face an uphill battle. The difficulty is partly intrinsic to the nature of the phenomenon. Post-internet culture rests on a collective delusion: at its centre is the idea that nothing of significance exists, or can even be imagined, outside of a limited and very specific set of practices, technologies, discourses—what we’ve come to see as online life. By positing itself as the de-facto baseline of all contemporary living, this mindset is so self-referential that it easily slips away from any attempts to frame it critically from the outside. Of the films that have tried to do so, Two Neighbours is the least unsuccessful I have seen so far.

An up-and-coming writer, Becky, ends up more or less willingly at a company party held in a palatial mansion outside New York City, where her father hopes she will make career-changing connections: in particular, with the company tycoon’s daughter, Stacey, who happens to be her same age. The party is meant to celebrate the launch of the company’s latest initiative: a grant-a-wish type of scheme where everyone (‘not just the sick and the needy’) can take part. Entertainment is provided by a Mephistophelian magician known only as the ‘genie’ (an histrionic Ralph Ineson). As the party slowly derails into an infernal mayhem, however, almost nothing goes as planned. 

Director Ondine Viñao and producer Ivy Freeman-Attwood have based their tale on one of Aesop’s fables, in which Zeus concocts a scheme to punish two neighbours (one greedy, the other envious) by granting them wishes. Over this narrative structure the film-makers overlay archetypes taken directly from the underbelly of the online world: from Evola-reading incels with an an obsession for exercise down to the two protagonists, Stacey and Becky, who are modelled after female stereotypes popular among the anonymous users of 4chan: respectively the popular-but-vacuous type (Stacey) and its smart-but-resentful foil (Becky).

For the most part, Two Neighbours weaves a convincingly mesmerising world. There are a few tonal missteps, but by and large Viñao, who has a background in video-art, steers her film safely through a baroque, sulphuric underworld, delivering the particular mixture of kitsch and pulsating hedonism that has become a stylistic hallmark of the genre. To her credit, this ain’t no Saltburn: the mise-en-scene is more critically focussed, with layers of visual sources called upon to deliver more than just spectacle or superficial satire. The performances, however, are not as a cohesive—and that, ultimately, is what sets the film up for failure.

Here’s the thing. When dealing with a self-referential and closed universe, you can go two ways. You can lean into it, and play up its inescapable logic, or you can look at it from the outside, and return something like a parodic reflection. What Two Neighbours tries to achieve is somewhere in-between. And on paper, it might have worked. The idea to construct a contemporary morality play by overlapping universal values (Aesop) with online stereotypes could have sidestepped the limitations of both approaches, opening up the cage of the post-internet mindset to a broader (moral?) scrutiny, without turning it into an object of mockery. But, ultimately, even Viñao and Freeman-Attwood couldn’t resist the centripetal force of the world they stage. For their parable to work, they should have stuck with a Lanthimos-esque point of view, internal maybe, but impersonal, even cruel. Instead, the first-person structure of the narrative drags the viewer—and the film—inexorably close to Becky, who is simultaneously too naturalistic and sympathetic to function as a cliché, and too obsessed to function as a fully-fledged character. This structural flaw undercuts the critique of film, leaving us with a stylish, cleverly thought-through, but ultimately not entirely convincing attempt. And with that, the representational challenge posed to the cinema (and to our common humanity) by post-internet culture continues.