Inside (2007)

ALEXANDRE BUSTILLO, JULIEN MAURY

INSIDE

FRANCE, 2007

6.5/10

"There's a strange woman by my door. Please hurry up. I don't know what she wants. She knows my name... she knows everything about me..."

Since I reviewed MARTYRS (2008) yesterday, I thought it might be fun if I reviewed another French film viewed as highly disturbing, INSIDE (2007).

This review is covered with various spoilers, some small, others larger, continue reading at your own discretion. 

When the film came out, I heard it praised by various genre fans as one of the scariest, brutal, most disturbing films in recent years, and so naturally, I had to check it out. The fact that I had nightmares as a child both about someone stabbing people with a pair of scissors and another about someone cutting an unborn fetus out of another person's uterus made me think that this film was perfect for me (the shot above of a pair of scissors stabbed through the protagonist's hand was literally a recurring nightmare I had as a kid). And so I went into this film with huge, huge expectations.

Despite a very weak opening scene (the CGI baby? really?), although I loved the windshield wiper still running against the broken window, the first 30 to 40 minutes were probably my favorite part of the film. The scene with La Femme at Sarah's door, asking her to let her in literally had me cowering in my seat more than any of the brutal violence that followed. The quick shot of her lighting her cigarette made me think for a second that Le Femme was in fact the nurse who smoked and talked to Sarah at the beginning of the film, an absolutely excellent red herring. I do believe that once La Femme was in the house and we got a good look at her, a lot of the tension was lost, but before we see her face, the shots of her just standing in the darkness are incredibly creepy. 

And then, after 30 minutes of exposition, we get what we paid for: to be grossed out and see just how much blood La Femme can manage to shed. Because of this, I'd like to propose a couple of alternate titles for INSIDE. Perhaps, PARTY AT SARAH'S? Or maybe 101 INVENTIVE USES FOR HOUSEHOLD SCISSORS. And there are quite a few uses of these scissors, my favorite obviously being the stabbed-hand shot (it also didn't help that I have an almost identical pair of scissors with are sitting on the table directly adjacent to me as I type this). The bathroom is probably my favorite set in the entire film, as red blood looks amazing against the clean white background of the room. The entire film is incredibly brutal and gory, which is really the only reason you watch this film: to see the gore.

The film is not without fault, though. It features some of the most idiotic policemen captured on film, it's repetitive, and even though it's pretty short, during the last 10 minutes, I was simply waiting for it to end. The zombie policeman (if you've seen the film you know exactly what I'm talking about) was useless, boring, and just downright not scary. The CGI shots (the aforementioned fetus shots, the scene were Sarah burns La Femme's face off) look horrible and inspire eye rolls instead of screams. The twist ending involving La Femme's identity is horrible (like, yeah, Sarah was told that everyone died in the crash, but surely she would have seen photos of the woman who died in the car they crashed into? Surely, Sarah would recognize her instantly?), and Sarah is somewhat unrelatable, as she is written as being detached from her friends and family, but the only thing this succeeds in doing is making Sarah detached from the audience as well. Honestly, the film is very, very good until La Femme cuts the lights, then it just goes downhill. 

I mainly watched this film just because I wanted to see if La Femme ever cut Sarah's stomach open and pulled the baby out. As I mentioned earlier, I had a nightmare about that as a kid, and the thing that made me want to watch this the most was the fact that that might be in there. I'm not going to say whether or not that happens, I just wanted to include that's mainly why I watched the film, because at the end of the day, people watch this film to see some disgusting pieces of blood and gore. And this film delivers on that. There are many, many, many faults in the film, but the gore makes up for it, and isn't that what we're watching for, anyways?