Aloys

“Is it true that you reg­u­lar­ly call a sex line since your father died?”, young Yen Lee (Yufei Li) asks her apart­ment block neigh­bour Aloys Adorn (Georg Friedrich). Yen is onto some­thing. If sex lines are designed to fuel erot­ic fan­ta­sy, root­ed in the audi­to­ry domain, for those who have prob­lems with inti­ma­cy, then Aloys – near per­ma­nent­ly attached by an ear­piece to mobile phone or dig­i­tal recorder while eschew­ing any more direct human con­tact with the woman on the oth­er end of the line – is engaged in his own imag­i­na­tive exer­cise of mas­tur­ba­to­ry solipsism.

Aloys is a lon­er who active­ly avoids oth­er peo­ple. He shuns the over­tures of a cre­ma­to­ri­um work­er (Agnes Lamp­kin) who recog­nis­es him from school. He ignores the curi­ous Yen (“You’re even more friend­ly than your father”, Yen com­plains sar­cas­ti­cal­ly). He rejects the offer of the jan­i­tor (Sebas­t­ian Krähen­bühl) to bring up a par­cel in return for a beer. And he nev­er meets face-to-face either with his clients or with the peo­ple he observes and records in his work as detec­tive – although he does, behind the closed door of his flat, obses­sive­ly view the videos that he has shot of them, and of his father, and of var­i­ous ani­mals. To Aloys, the out­side world and oth­er peo­ple are best kept at a remove – and the open­ing shots of Tobias Nölle’s fea­ture debut, reveal­ing Aloys’ apart­ment devoid of fur­ni­ture or vital signs (apart from a run­ning tap and an aban­doned video cam­era), are an apt intro­duc­tion to his emp­ty, insu­lat­ed life.

The night of his father’s cre­ma­tion, Aloys pass­es out drunk on a bus, and awak­ens to find his cam­era and nine DV tapes stolen. Not long after, a mys­te­ri­ous black­mail­er (Til­da von Over­beck) calls, and tells Aloys about ​“phone-walk­ing… invent­ed in 1984 by a Japan­ese neu­rol­o­gist… for shy men.” Aloys works out who his caller is, but not before her voice and words have tak­en hold of his imag­i­na­tion, and he has start­ed fan­ta­sis­ing a whol­ly dif­fer­ent life – of excur­sions, par­ties, friend­ship and more.

He is an extreme intro­vert caught at the inter­sec­tion between real­i­ty and fic­tion, uncer­tain where his mind ends and the world begins. Like Eraserhead’s Hen­ry, Aloys is a with­drawn dream­er exiled with­in his own apart­ment, then here too the radi­a­tor will help him find a momen­tary heav­en. Still, while his tele­phon­ic part­ner may be a Dream Girl, she is not of the Man­ic Pix­ie vari­ety, but comes with her own very real lone­li­ness and des­per­a­tion, no mat­ter how much Aloys may ide­alise her.

Much of Nölle’s film is shot wide, invit­ing us either to observe its chimeri­cal imagery from a dis­tance, or to try to get in close, even at the risk of pain. For Aloys is a mod­ern fable of alien­ation, full as much of sad­ness as of hope for a bet­ter, more con­nect­ed existence.