Noise (2011)

Directed by: Jan Doense | 10 minutes | comedy, crime, short film | Actors: Mirjam de Rooij, Victor Lowe

Rie (Mirjam de Rooij) wakes up, it is 05:04 in the morning. In the background you can hear ‘noise from the neighbours’. There is throwing, heavy stumbling sounds and loud yelling. When she offends her husband (Victor Löw), he tries to allay her fear that something serious might happen with soothing words. ‘As long as they throw stuff, are they still alive?!’. Her husband uses the recognizable strategy of: “I don’t want to be involved, don’t want to hear anything and certainly won’t interfere with me!”

The woman accepts these conclusions with great reluctance. But at 6:24 am it hit again. She decides to call, against her husband’s emphatic advice. The neighbor is still alive, but asks her to call the police. What exactly happened? When the couple watches TV in the evening and has their meal seated on the couch, the news becomes clear about what happened at the neighbors. However, the discussion in the early morning did not leave Rie untouched, nor did her husband’s denial behavior. Rie comes to her own decision…

‘Rumoer’ by director Jan Doense, based on the screenplay by Phil van Tongeren, was included in the Official Selection of the Netherlands Film Festival in 2011. The film was shot in one day with a budget of zero euros. With that minimal time and budget space, you might expect the final product to look flimsy and the storyline to be low. Nothing could be further from the truth: nothing can be said about the location and the overall finish.

‘Rumoer’ is just a fine short film and in just ten minutes it tells a complete story in which both a message and humor are incorporated. Both actors know how to bring their characters to life, in which both the annoyance and the doubts about what happened are perfectly conveyed. Short and powerful!