Inside (À l'intérieur)

The sum total of what I learned from Inside:

I don’t want to be killed with a pair of scissors.


Inside is a nasty piece of work, but it is not a particularly good film. What we have here is a fairly standard killer-in-the-house movie, replete with unreasonably vicious death scenes and stock characters (the concerned boss, the stupid cops) that drop by intermittently to keep the movie from ending after twenty minutes. I caught wind of Inside via some early reviews that indicated I was in for some of the sickest shit I’ve ever seen, so naturally I was intrigued. I have to admit that some of Inside made me feel like a bad person for watching it (this is the litmus test I use to determine the effectiveness of violence/gore in this type of horror film) but that’s all the film seems to be interested in. This isn’t so much a story as an endurance test for an audience, an exercise in cruelty. Things happen because the directors (French newcomers Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury) want to make you upset. They are not nice people. They figured the whole torture porn thing was getting too soft and decided to throw down the gauntlet.

Inside is about Sarah, a pregnant woman mourning the loss of her husband. The film opens with the car accident responsible for his death, which also seems to be a close call for the unborn CGI baby, who we see rattling around in the womb looking pissed. Flash forward to four months later and Sarah is about to pop, which immediately puts any reasonable audience member that hasn’t developed an immunity to cliché on edge. Watching a pregnant woman in peril is like watching someone juggling eggs, and in this case the jugglers are complete assholes. The night before she is due to check into the hospital, a strange woman shows up at her door asking to use her phone. Sarah is overly cautious and doesn’t let the woman in, which turns out to be the right decision. This decision produces the creepiest moment of the film, as the stranger’s next move is to stand outside a sliding glass door smoking a cigarette in the dark while Sarah phones the cops and takes pictures. It isn’t necessary to describe anything else about the plot, suffice to say the woman doesn’t decide to go home or be a productive member of society or anything. Her weapon of choice is the pair of scissors I mentioned in my introduction. She explains why she’s there at the end of the film using voiceover and flashback, and it’s a completely ridiculous explanation. No explanation at all would have been a lot more unsettling, but Inside opts for an almost-cheating-groaner-of-a-twist, laying the contrivances of the plot bare. Inside barely clocks in at eighty minutes, and even at this length the concept is stretched pretty thin. The whole killer in the house angle is fairly shopworn; the only true wild card is the pregnancy. So at the bare minimum, I expect the characters to behave in a rational manner. That doesn’t happen. Everything in the film occurs because the filmmakers have complete control, I was half expecting the killer to turn to the camera Funny Games style and insult me for being a sick bastard. But Inside plays everything with a straight face, and most of the characters are impossibly stupid for no other reason than lazy storytelling.


There is one character who defies logic with such panache that the only way to do the absurdity justice is to describe his entire role in the film. The character in question is a police officer, following up on Sarah’s report of a disturbance earlier in the evening. He waits in the car with a perp while two other officers go to the door. The two officers realize something is amiss (the woman they spoke to at the door is not pregnant) on the way back to the car, and return to the house to check their suspicions. Shots are fired (despite their guns these cops were ill prepared for a woman with a knitting needle.) At this point, the logical thing for the cop in the car to do would be to call for backup. Instead, this officer handcuffs himself to the petty crook from the backseat and proceeds into the house without making the backup call. Upon discovering a pregnant woman in the middle of a Fangoria spread, he spends an inordinate amount of time with his back to an open doorway, trying to make her put down a piece of broken mirror so he can bandage her hands. He at least has the common sense to arm the criminal he is shackled to, but for some reason refuses to free him. When the lights go out (as they always do in these situations) his new priority becomes finding the breaker box and turning the lights back on. Apparently he just wasn’t satisfied with his flashlight, a tool that even the killer didn’t have. He tells Sarah to go wait in the bedroom, alone, while he fixes the lights. She doesn’t object (something to the effect of “officer, I’m in labor and there is a crazy person in the house, perhaps you can take me to the hospital?” would have worked) but I’m not going to argue with the behavior of a woman in shock. The cop and the criminal proceed downstairs to the breaker box, where the cop chastises the criminal for being concerned about the murderer in the house. This guy was too stupid to live another second at this point, so you do the math. However, even major brain trauma (a point blank shot with some sort of riot gun) isn’t enough to stop this nonsensical idiot. He rises from the dead later in the film to fix the lights, and then buffets Sarah in the stomach for no reason at all. Apparently a shot to the head lobotomized the part of his brain preventing him from being a psycho killer. Or maybe the bullet had a spell on it that turns dead bodies evil while improving their aptitude for electrical work. We know this man had a cell phone throughout all of this, because he is using it when he is first introduced to us, talking to a ball-busting girlfriend. If he’s this inept in his relationship it’s not hard to see why she rags on him so hard. Horror Movie Survival 101: When dealing with serial killers, being a dumbass is not an acceptable alternative to the fight or flight response. Since the opening scene is a near death experience, I suppose you could explain away the whole slasher plot (holes and all) as the protagonist’s dying brain personifying death as a crazy woman, but I personally don’t support that “it’s all in their head!” business if I can help it.


It’s a shame that Inside is practically ruined by all this nonsense, because I can at least recommend it on a technical level. The film is shot very well and the gore is top notch work. If this was a Dario Argento film (and at times it feels like one) no one would care about all the plot contrivances, but for some reason the absurdity can’t be chalked up as part of the charm here. Also very Argento and not part of the charm: bad dubbing. I’m not sure if there is a version with subtitles out there, but I noticed that there is English writing in some scenes so I assume the film was made for English audiences. Inside builds a great sense of dread, but the flaws are too distracting to maintain that dread. If you have seen Haute Tension (a slightly better piece of French Grand Guignol) you should already have a good idea of whether or not you will like Inside. I didn’t, but there were at least a few scenes that allowed me some “well now I’ve seen that” moments.

Make no mistake, this is a very brutal movie. It will be mean to you. You will not feel good during or after watching it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.