Inside opens with a Willem Dafoe voice-over telling us about an assignment he had in elementary school. The teacher asked what three things he would take with him if his house caught fire, and he responded with his cat, an AC/DC album and a sketchbook… never once mentioning his family. He then notes how over time the cat died and he lost the album, but he kept his sketchbook, thus beginning the first of many, many, many heavy handed metaphors about art and the passage of time for the next 105 minutes.
Nemo, played by Dafoe, is an art thief who gets locked inside his mark’s fancy penthouse suite during a heist gone wrong. His crew abandons him, leaving him to figure out an escape plan on his own. Nemo also broke the apartment’s thermostat during the botched operation, causing his now-permanent home to alternate between 100 degree heat and sub-freezing temperatures. Without food or running water, Nemo is forced to survive off scraps and a garden drip system for sustenance.
Dafoe‘s performance is spectacular as one would expect. He brings an extreme intensity and is doing a lot of physically demanding work for the role. He’s a perfect fit for the part to the point that it’s almost on the nose to cast him. For something like this film to work the solo leading man needs to have the ability to showcase the slow spiral and decline of the character’s mental wellbeing while simultaneously having a leading man’s charisma and screen presence the whole time. The film is so squarely focused on Nemo that Dafoe has to be able to be center of the frame for the whole runtime, meaning his performance has to be captivating for an hour and forty-five minutes or the entire movie would fall apart. It’s a heavy ask but there probably isn’t another actor more game and as talented as Dafoe.
The problem is that he’s trying to carry too much emptiness in the film. There’s a thematic throughline about the value of art versus the value of a human life and art lasting longer than life which is somewhat compelling, but not overwhelmingly so. It’s also not saying anything about those things that Banshees of Inisherin didn’t already cover in a superior manner just a few months ago. Mostly the film is an endurance exercise in faux-profundity. Constant cutaways to things like a wounded bird outside the penthouse reek of a storyteller who is desperate to find imagery that will be poetic and intellectually rich, but end up hollow and simplistic. Inside is very much a dumb person’s idea of a smart movie.
There’s just so little going on in the film dramatically that it winds up being punishingly boring for long stretches. Dragging the film out to nearly two hours just makes one wonder what the point of it all is.
It’s probably a bit more monday-morning-quarterback-ing on my part than I like to do in my reviews, but I feel like if this film is going to be as long as it is what would’ve made it work is to actually spend more than a hot minute on the opening heist setup.
I’m always a sucker for a good heist flick, so part of that is me just having wishful thinking, but it’s also easily the most interesting part of the film. The heist could have been a superior introduction to the film’s central narrative if more time had been spent building up to the moment it all goes wrong so that it actually feels like a rug pull rather than just a setup. Even the flashback from before the heist doesn’t add very much but at least there’s an element of intrigue that is desperately missing from the grueling, protracted nothingness of the main story. I just wish that the thematic point of the flashbacks weren’t so on the nose about the whole “Art vs Human Experience” to the point of feeling run down from it all being hammered home to the nth degree.
I do, however, love the intricate sound design of Inside. There’s a lot of clever uses of noise and the sense of hearing early on in the film. When the heist goes wrong the penthouse alarm goes off with a blown-out piercing siren. We then watch Nemo put ear plugs in and the noise dulls, but is still there. Throughout the film high pitched ear-ringing creeps in and out of the sound mix in a way that sounds unnervingly like actual tinnitus. We also hear the sound of helicopters flying over the building repeatedly, which gives a slight hope that the story will have a (mostly) happy ending
I will also say that Vasilis Katsoupis is clearly not without directorial talent. There is a real competence to elements of this film, such as using visual storytelling to represent the passage of time. Katsoupis doesn’t rely on hacky things like title cards or subtitles that inform the audience of how long Nemo has been stuck in the penthouse. Instead you see Dafoe’s beard slowly growing over time, you see pots and pans fill the sink and items in the penthouse slowly degrade without proper care and maintenance. At one point there is even a great big pile of shit that lets you know it’s been quite a long while.
The problem is that 105 minutes is an agonizingly long time to spend in one room with one person with little to nothing happening. There’s just an endless repetition of Defoe trying to craft wrenches out of wood and to build a tower to get to the light fixture he believes will be his salvation. Long sequences of Dafoe using a pocket knife to chip away at a wooden door reach almost “Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes” levels of comical repetitiousness. It just gets gratuitous once you add in the numerous “Nemo slowly goes crazy” scenes such as him having hallucinations, building shrines or using the CCTV access the penthouse has to stalk a maintenance woman.
It’s all just so overdone and rehashed to the point that one begs the filmmakers to notice that the horse died at least half an hour ago.
Inside just doesn’t have enough juice to sustain itself. Entering the theater I really hoped this one would’ve been good. I always hope a movie is going to be good, but especially an indie like this that’s coming out opposite some megabudget spring blockbusters. I’m always hoping that something like that with an interesting concept and starring one of our legendarily great actors is going to be great. But I’d be lying if I didn’t have a fear that the premise of Inside sounds like an awesome 20 or 30 minute short film or an awesome bottle episode of a prestige crime drama. Hell, even a trashy sub-80 minute thriller would have been a better fit for what the film is going for. Instead this movie feels painfully languid.
Obviously a movie that is just about a guy being stuck in a room for days, weeks and months is going to have a feeling of monotony, but it just feels like there’s so much bloat and padding that if the movie had been tighter it would’ve been a much more compelling watch. As is, Inside is a handsome film to look at, featuring a stellar Willem Dafoe performance, even if it’s far too lengthy and not nearly as high minded as it thinks it is.
