The Good Neighbor

A friendship builds slowly between David and his new neighbour Robert; the two men are nothing alike, but something holds. Then one night David hits a young woman with his car and she dies. At Robert's insistence, David leaves her lying there and drives off. From that moment on what is between them stops being friendship: Robert believes the secret has bound the man to him permanently, and David cannot sleep for guilt. Stephan Rick's German thriller is about the point at which good neighbourliness turns into holding somebody hostage. When David meets Vanessa, the dead woman's sister, he thinks he can put something right; but he has not accounted for Robert, who will do anything to keep his neighbour to himself. The film escalates the dependency between the two men rather than the violence, and that is the frightening part.