Next to Her

The sub­ject of social care is deemed crit­i­cal­ly unsexy with­in polit­i­cal cir­cles. To take an inter­est in the com­fort of those less for­tu­nate than our­selves is not a bona fide vote win­ner – social car­ers mud­dle through how­ev­er they can, and that’s all we need to know about the mat­ter. Israeli direc­tor Asaf Korman’s sen­si­tive 2014 fea­ture, Next to Her, reveals the chal­lenges of liv­ing along­side some­one with dis­abil­i­ties, not just on a prac­ti­cal day-to-day lev­el, but also its impact on any poten­tial emo­tion­al and roman­tic life.

Liron Ben-Shlush plays Chel­li, a hard-nosed secu­ri­ty guard who looks after her men­tal­ly dis­abled sis­ter, Gab­by (Dana Ivgy). The sib­lings have a close bond, even though Gab­by is unable to ful­ly com­pre­hend the love, care and eter­nal patience that is expend­ed try­ing to get her through each day in one piece. If ten­sions even rise, Gabby’s stock mode of rebel­lion involves head-butting the hard floor of their cosy apart­ment. Chel­li is only able bal­ance her home and work life by lock­ing Gab­by inside the apart­ment dur­ing the day time – a reflec­tion of the fact that she’s will­ing to take dras­tic mea­sures to make this arrange­ment work, and that she doesn’t want oth­ers med­dling in her affairs.

When she gets caught and a social car­er agrees to take Gab­by off her hands, Che­li sud­den­ly has time to do all the things that she’s had to for­go, such as meet­ing a man. When Zohar (Yaakov Zada Daniel) enters the frame, she sud­den­ly finds her­self in an awk­ward love tri­an­gle that’s she’s tempt­ed to break in order to secure a hap­py and care­free life for her­self. A shared sis­ter­ly bath turns from play­ful fool­ing to a near-mur­der when a Chel­li con­sid­ers how easy it would be to end her sister’s life.

It’s an intrigu­ing and dra­mat­ic sit­u­a­tion, though in the end direc­tor Kor­man (aid­ed by Ben-Shlush’s impres­sive screen­play) opts for retain­ing a soapy lev­i­ty rather than wal­low­ing in the depres­sive state of its cen­tral char­ac­ter. Visu­al­ly, it’s not doing any­thing out of the ordi­nary, but what’s most impres­sive about Next To Her, how­ev­er, is that it does not preach or claim to offer any clear solu­tions to a wide­spread prob­lem which is too often swept under the rug.