‘Everything Else Is Noise’ Berlinale Review: Interview as Performance, Art as Negotiation

The art of the interview has always been fertile ground for comedy. The challenge lies in approaching it with fairness, intelligence, and empathy—without resorting to cheap irony or easy mockery. Everything Else Is Noise not only captures the mechanics of that format with generosity; it uses it as a springboard to explore broader concerns around artistic practice, ego, sexism, and parent-child dynamics. Mexican filmmaker Nicolás Pereda never ventures—at least visually—beyond a modest Mexico City apartment’s living room and kitchen, yet from that confined space he constructs a universe that extends far beyond those four walls.

Tere (Teresita Sánchez, the remarkable actress who appears in nearly all of his films) is a cellist who, just as the movie begins, receives a complaint from a neighbor for practicing during the rare hours when her baby happens to be asleep. There’s no real solution to that problem, but it does prompt a reflection on the film’s soundscape and how it will shape everything that follows. In a building where the electricity mysteriously keeps going out, Tere welcomes Rosa (Rosa Estela Juárez Vargas), a younger composer and friend. This is no casual visit: Tere has lent Rosa her bright, comfortable apartment for a television interview scheduled to take place there. She even coaches her on how to answer certain questions—suggesting she embellish or outright lie if it makes for better television.

Soon enough, the journalist and his cameraman (Lázaro G. Rodríguez and Francisco Barreiro, two more Pereda regulars) arrive to shoot the segment. From that point on, however, nothing goes smoothly. Street noise seeps in, power outages disrupt the image, and once the crew realizes the two women make for compelling material, they have to improvise how to frame—and mic—them both. Tere’s daughter Luisa (Luisa Pardo), also a cellist, soon joins the conversation, further complicating the staging. Amid this sea of miscommunications, small deceptions, grievances, and offhand remarks about the art world, more delicate tensions begin to surface among the participants. And then more people show up.

The director of Fauna and Lázaro de noche—this being his eleventh solo feature—is known for dry, quietly disquieting stories that fold back onto themselves, offering fresh perspectives on what has already unfolded. In recent years, his characteristically minimalist approach to comedy has opened up, moving toward a style that—at the risk of oversimplifying—recalls that of Martín Rejtman, with its deadpan, faintly abrasive sense of humor. Everything Else Is Noise is arguably his most overtly funny film to date, its long takes, extended conversations, narrative detours, and playful use of offscreen space evoking the work of Hong Sang-soo, who similarly mines awkward encounters between artists for humor that ultimately cuts deeper than it first appears.

The film draws inspiration from Pereda’s own mother, a composer and performer of contemporary classical music. That firsthand familiarity is evident in the exchanges between musicians, their interactions with journalists, and the telling details that emerge from those moments. To the situational humor generated by the interview’s increasingly absurd internal logic, Pereda adds—across three distinct acts or “movements”—sharper reflections on Tere’s relationship with her daughter, their shared history with the girl’s father (a celebrated musician who will eventually make an appearance), and the implicit machismo embedded in the discourse surrounding both the art world at large and contemporary music in particular.

All of this unfolds in just 71 minutes and across only a couple of locations, where Pereda also weaves in dialogue borrowed from other sources—a film by Tacita Dean, a text by Mario Bellatin—folding them into his own script. The result, achieved with minimal resources and striking conceptual clarity, is a portrait of the curious world of contemporary music and its inhabitants that is as humorous as it is perceptive and deeply empathetic.