by Nataliia Serebriakova
Worth: $16.40
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Diagonale Film Festival
Cast:
Charlotte Aubin, Ari Brand, Erica Sarda, Mark Bracich, Adam Ratcliffe, Julie Chapin, Jordan Dallam, Jefrey B. Wilkerson, Kevin Trinio Perdido
Intro:
What makes Beautiful and Neat Room truly delightful is its sharp wit and understated humour. The film is full of clever, observational comedy that never feels forced, capturing the absurdities of urban life and the quirks of human behaviour with elegance and charm.
Beautiful and Neat Room represents an unexpected turn in Austrian cinema, which has often been drawn to darker, more perverse themes in the vein of Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl.
A young, single artist named Mary lives in Brooklyn in a small rented apartment. To afford the rent, she decides to sublet a tiny room to random guests through Airbnb. Her first tenant is a strange musician who eats nothing but spaghetti with sauce and leaves his dirty, torn towel in the bathroom. The next guest is Mary’s former friend from Tribeca, a pretentious fashion girl who wastes electricity and constantly delays paying rent.
Because of her relationship with this guest, Mary is forced to begin online therapy sessions with an elderly psychotherapist, to whom she confesses her struggles with violated personal boundaries and her own desire for independence. Eventually, she even has to change the locks in her apartment.
This nearly two-hour film, light and easy to watch, was presented at the Austrian film festival, Diagonale. It was directed by Austrian filmmaker Maria Petschnig, who has been living and working as an artist in New York since 2003. It seems that many of the amusing stories in the film are drawn from her own experiences of life in the United States.
Mary, the protagonist, is an emancipated woman; she starts her day with yoga, enjoys cooking, and has many gay friends. However, like many freelancers in New York, she faces financial instability, which forces her to tolerate unbearable roommates. One of them, in a state of drunkenness, even tries to break into her room at night.
Despite this, the director avoids dramatising the situation, instead interweaving these stories with vivid, almost painterly sketches of everyday life in New York. Her style recalls the work of Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach, and Lena Dunham. Maria Petschnig uses cuts in unexpected places, disrupting linear storytelling and giving the film a dynamic, almost sitcom-like rhythm.
One of the more predictable yet charming episodes involves Mary living with a Latino gay man who owns a large, fluffy cat — an animal she quickly falls in love with. Paraphrasing Madonna, a girl’s best friends are gay men and cats.
What makes Beautiful and Neat Room truly delightful is its sharp wit and understated humour. The film is full of clever, observational comedy that never feels forced, capturing the absurdities of urban life and the quirks of human behaviour with elegance and charm. Mary’s interactions with her eccentric tenants, combined with the director’s playful visual style, create a story that is both relatable and entertaining. It is a film that balances humour with insight, offering an astute, often hilarious look at the challenges of independence, friendship, and navigating life in a bustling city like New York.
