David Andernach (Mads Mikkelsen) is a painter who’s cheating on his wife with the neighbor lady. One day, while busy with his affair when his wife is at work, he leaves his daughter unsupervised and she ends up drowning in the garden pool. His entire life falls apart: his wife understandably leaves him, he ends up with an alcohol problem, and five years later he’s still desperate for forgiveness. When he realizes none can be given, especially not from himself, he leaves his ex-wife a final message on the answering machine telling her he won’t bother her anymore. Then he tries to commit suicide by drowning himself in the same pool his daughter died in, but of course his ex-wife called for his best friend to go check on him after the not exactly subtle message. Later, when walking home, he suddenly sees a blue butterfly. Nothing really strange about that, except it’s wintertime. He decides to follow it (because, who wouldn’t follow after a blue butterfly in the middle of winter, right?), and is taken through a mystical corridor hidden behind some shrubs. He gets to a door, and on the other side exists in a world very much like his own, a parallel universe of sorts. Except for one thing: it’s five years earlier, and here his daughter is still alive. Knowing what’s about to happen, he manages to save his daughter from drowning in the pool while his other self is busy banging the neighbor. This means that in this world everything is the way he wants, but there’s only one problem: there’s now two of himself there. In order to live the life he desperately wants, being able to erase the hell he’s been living through for the last five years, he ends up killing his other self and buries him in the garden. Who could possibly suspect a murder when no one is missing, right? Except…things will not be that easy, of course.
The Door (original title: Die Tür) is a German science fiction thriller from 2009, directed by Anno Saul, based on a book by Akif Pirinçci (writer of the animated cat thriller Felidae). The story told here have the clear structure of an old-fashioned moralistic fairytale, told in a way where you will inevitably question what your own decision would have been in a similar situation. We all have things we regret, we all have our moments of “oh, if I could just turn back time…“ and believing everything would have been so much better. And maybe it would have been… or maybe not. Maybe everything would be even worse. There is no doubt in Hell, however, that someone would not have wanted to go back in time to save their own child’s life, despite the risks of things taking a different turn than hoped for or expected. Thus, The Door takes a common “what if I could have done it over again“ setting and turns it into something horrific, a dark fable playing on the darkness of the human psyche.
There are a few issues with the plot where some of it doesn’t make all too much sense. I haven’t read the book, so cannot make comparisons, and I can easily see how some of it may not have translated as well into film. Still, The Door is a nice sci-fi thriller that keeps you guessing with its many twists and turns.
Director: Anno Saul
Writer: Jan Berger
Originaltitle: Die Tür
Country & year: Germany, 2009
Actors: Mads Mikkelsen, Jessica Schwarz, Valeria Eisenbart, Thomas Thieme, Tim Seyfi, Stefan Gebelhoff, Suzan Anbeh, Heike Makatsch, Nele Trebs, Thomas Arnold, Karsten Dahlem, René Lay
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1223934/
