On Screen
Inside
BY Adam Nayman April 09, 2008 15:04
Some genre films go over the top; the French thriller Inside — which is being presented at the Bloor Cinema by Rue Morgue magazine — screeches to a halt somewhere in the vicinity of Kilimanjaro. That’s metaphorically speaking, of course: almost all of the film’s running time is spent inside a suburban French maison, where a very pregnant young widow (Alysson Paradis) recuperating from an automobile accident is menaced by a mysterious stranger played, in a dead-witty stroke of casting, by Trouble Every Day star Beatrice Dalle.
What starts out as a cat-and-mouse game (with Dalle as a lurking, spectral presence) gradually accrues participants until it becomes a kind of arterial-spray-drenched farce — one that stands in awed thrall to the fury of the maternal urge. Is it a stunt? If so, it’s a genuinely risky and bruising one — and the flash of scissors in the vicinity of a pregnant belly marks the moment when the filmmakers dispense with any sense of a safety net.
In addition to wielding gore effects with impunity, directors Alexandre Bustilo and Julien Maury demonstrate a rigor mortis grip of suspense mechanics that a pretender like Alexandre Aja can only dream of. And they take their story’s relentless, repulsive and deeply symbolic violence to its brutally logical conclusion. Inside’s jaw-dropping final moments are at once the last word in depravity and the beginning of a longer conversation about the poetic potentials of the visceral. Inside is gutsy in every sense of the word.
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