From Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) to Body Double (Brian De Palma, 1984) and the slew of ’90s erotic thrillers, cinema has long been obsessed with the thrill of watching — the way a gaze can control, possess and eroticise (and titillate the audience by forcing them into the game). Interior (2025), the debut feature from German director Pascal Schuh, updates this tradition for a world where passive observation is second nature.
The film follows Dr Liebermann (Knut Berger), a brain surgeon who enlists his younger live-in partner Kasimir (Daniil Kremkin) — more submissive than lover — to break into homes in a hollowed-out couch (a Trojan sofa!) and film their occupants, turning private lives into a laboratory for human behaviour. Beneath this sleek premise lies a deeper study of voyeurism and male power exchange; it’s like a pervy, BDSM-inflected Sliver (Philip Noyce, 1993) with a medical angle thrown in. Like Zeke (William Baldwin) in Sliver, who surveils his neighbours to cultivate intimacy with new tenant Carly (Sharon Stone), Interior argues that watching can mimic feeling — while keeping the watcher safely insulated from real engagement.
From its first moments, Interior carries an odd sexual charge that’s horny yet distant. We meet the couple as Kasimir crawls out of a sofa frame in their workshop and wanders the house in his underwear with a camcorder, filming the doctor from the second-story window as he comes home. Desire is redirected into fetishised domestic ritual, most memorably their nightly dinner: a TV-dinner tableau of three fish sticks, mashed potatoes and peas on a tray that looks lifted from a prison canteen. The meal is austere and absurdly minimal, yet prepared — and filmed — with erotic precision. Wearing rubber gloves, they move with ritualistic care, as though this modest plate is a substitute for the sex they’re not having. The eroticism lies in discipline and obsessive attention to the banal, transforming it into a space of longing and latent intimacy.
As they eat in front of the TV, the nature of the relationship comes into focus. They’re not watching Drag Race or the latest Netflix slop, but surveillance footage from their latest break-in. In the clip, an old woman is stuck halfway up her stairlift; Kasimir knows he should intervene, but the doctor has trained him not to. Liebermann, emotionally frozen and dominant, uses stolen footage not for leverage but for study. His desire is clinical: understanding emotion without participating in it. Surveillance becomes a grotesque empathy — omniscience at the price of connection. Distance is enforced; morality isn’t part of the equation.
The dom/sub dynamic echoes Sliver in a way that isn’t immediately obvious. On the surface, Sliver is a sleek voyeur thriller, but underneath, it’s pure power exchange. In both films, watching is the leash: the dominant partner uses surveillance to control, seduce and create a craving that can only be fed with more footage. Zeke gives Carly forbidden glimpses while hoarding the power; Liebermann does the same with Kasimir, only colder and more systematic. Kasimir’s “reward” is the illusion of intimacy — he gets to participate, to be useful — while every gesture is scripted and every emotion policed.
Here, desire is cultivated through observation and ritual; genuine connection is withheld. Watching becomes the only sanctioned form of touch. The film’s power lies in this emotional conditioning: we’re watching a psychologically exhausting relationship (for the sub) with no aftercare… unless frozen fish sticks and karaoke count.
Without spoiling later developments, Interior plants itself squarely in the voyeur-thriller family tree, and then takes the genre somewhere mesmerising. Peeping Tom exposed the pathology of the gaze; Body Double made the audience complicit; Sliver wired an entire apartment building for it. Interior nods to all three, then strips the fantasy down. Unlike Sharon Stone, who can’t understand how Baldwin refuses to intervene, its voyeur doesn’t direct, intervene, or seduce. The only commandment is: keep the camera rolling. You never know what will happen. That ruthless passivity holds a mirror to how we live now. It echoes the reflex of TikTok, Reels, Stories — endless looking that asks nothing of us and costs even less. Desire drifts without consequence, intimacy becomes access, responsibility slides out of frame. Everything happens, and we can watch it for free.
Ultimately, Interior is about watching without acting, loving without reciprocation, training another into emotional detachment and finding erotic weight in the banal. Cold, dark, precise and eerily contemporary, it studies emotional detachment in the age of screens in a completely unique and unpredictable way. There’s not a lot of quotable dialogue in Interior, but Sharon Stone’s final, infamously dumb line in Sliver — fired at the camera amid smashed monitors — still resonates, aimed at voyeuristic boyfriends, couch-hiding burglars, and all of us glued to screens:
GET A LIFE!!!
Editor-at-large Jared loves movies and lives with Kiki in Berlin.