Starring: Alysson Paradis, Béatrice Dalle

Directed By: Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury

Written By: Alexandre Bustillo

Released: 2007

Grade: B+

As if there was any question, it’s official, France is where the center of the excellence of modern day horror. This started with the bloody and intense High Tension in 2003. Recently, Them, Frontier(s), and now Inside have followed in its’ lead, to expose problems in society and especially the latter two creatively did this with momentous amounts of gore, that managed to serve us some meaning and perspective on the situation. I still think Frontier(s) is the best of the French horror films, mostly because it manages to do so much and creatively dealt with the political and societal problems through representations of imprisonment and Nazi controlling figures, causing the paranoid state to be nothing less than logical. Inside is a much simpler story and I appreciate that it does follow an intriguing and very possible story, made very severe through the constant chase and bloody rampage of one very scorned woman.

The film opens on an already very bloody, injured, and scared, not to mention pregnant, Sarah (Paradis). She is being chased by an angered and seemingly insane woman (Dalle). Sarah uses the bathroom as a hiding place, but she ends up getting trapped in there. This puts her killer in the perfect position. When the police come to help, the killer is thought to be the victim and is able to get rid of the policeman while Sarah is trapped, getting weaker than ever. Just as Sarah is about to find a way out, her hand is stabbed to the wall with piercingly sharp scissors. The woman has so much rage, and aggressive tact that even when the police come back, learning of the crimes she has committed, they are ultimately no match for her, as they die trying to save Sarah with little success. Sarah is attacked even more, at this point it is truly a shock that she is even still alive. Her attacker won’t stop until she gets what she wants from Sarah; her baby.

There isn’t necessarily a ton of dialogue in the film especially from Alysson Paradis as Sarah. She was completely fear stricken and more so than that she showed pain and immense suffering in her face. Sarah kept on trying to get through the hell she was in, even though it would be much easier to just give in and end her life then and there. She keeps going as her desperation and anger gets deeper and deeper, making her give her attacker some similar treatment. Béatrice Dalle gives us an insane and very vengeful woman who is completely relentless, never being the least bit easy on anyone who comes in her way of the plan she is executing. It really seems as if she doesn’t have a conscious, but we realize that it has just been killed from an experience of loss.

Motherhood and protecting it is of the up most importance to the characters of the film. We learn that there is a reason to what happened to Sarah and it is more than a random home invasion. Sarah and her killer were in a car accident with one another, causing the then pregnant driver to lose her baby before she even had a chance to give it life. From that point, nothing else mattered. Her morals, her mind, and her sense of decency for others was gone. She wanted a baby in her arms no matter what she had to do in order for that to happen, brutally harming anyone who stood in her way. By going after Sarah, it was really just a way to get what she wanted and to take it away from the person who took the very same thing away from her. Even though she seems crazy from start to finish, we still understand what she was doing and why she was doing it.

Sarah’s paternal instincts is clear as well. Surely, she did not want to die. Even more so, she couldn’t die, because she couldn’t let her baby die. The massive amounts of pain and essential torture she was fighting through just to keep her baby alive wasn’t quite as much for her as for the hope and determination to save her child. Sarah wanted to get them out of this horrible situation so her baby would have a chance. In Frontier(s) motherhood is dealt with to some extent too. The conclusion though is that there is nothing noble about it. Bringing a child in to a world with so much hate, violence, and injustice is just setting them up for hardships, never knowing just how soon that will result in their own death. Although, on the outside it seems that Inside is taking a more positive outlook on the role, it really isn’t. Yes, there is a desperation and desire to have and protect children. However, in this case it causes the extremely painful and nearly unbearable death of many, some who were only there because they were trying to help the victim. When just the illusion of having a kid, since it clearly isn’t the attackers, can get someone to do such horrible things, it becomes a supplier of the evil that will only spur further lies and deceptions. You look at the vicious killings this woman committed and just the thought that this could be Sarah’s poor child’s new mother, surely never to know who its’ real mother is, forced to be raised by this mad woman, is a pretty horrifying thought. Who knows what kind of a demented childhood it will have now. Perhaps some of her behaviors may even rub off on it.

For you gore fans, this is one intense cat and mouse murderous chase full of very uncomfortable moments of blood, blood, and more blood. This is made even worse because it started before we were even there and it continues through out the whole film, really with no breaks in between. Inside is really about the action that is constantly going on. One of the most grotesque scenes is while trying to get away from her murderer, Sarah is about to have her baby, right then and there. In this moment, there is not much Sarah can do to save herself. Her attacker has the full advantage and what she wants is about to come out. Does she wait though? Of course not, she grabs the bloody scissors and violently splits her stomach open, then pulls the baby away from her. The film is pretty short, but it is a pretty simple story, so it works well. Being action rather than dialogue based, it has a fast paced tone, but the continuous and relentless killing scenes that make up the entire film make it seems like it takes its’ time more than it really does, through an almost torturous feeling for the audience’s perspective as it becomes tedious and hard to watch. Still the gore is top notch, but unlike many films that attempt this, it is not pointless. It accomplishes its’ goal of showing the extremes of this woman and how both women do things they most likely never thought they would do, mirroring the massive amount of horror that the child will be born upon.