Directors: Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury
85 minutes (18) 2007
Second Sight Blu-ray
Rating: 7/10
Review by Christopher Geary
[Released 5th February]
Riding on its decade’s bloody new wave of French horrors - including such thrillers as Alexandre Aja’s hallucinatory High Tension (aka: Switchblade Romance), Xavier Gans’ splattery sci-fi masterwork Frontiers, and Pascal Laugier’s astonishing Martyrs - grisly shocker Inside (aka: A l’interieur), brings a gripping claustrophobic power. Directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, this stars Alysson Paradis, as heavily pregnant widow Sarah, and the great Beatrice Dalle as a nameless ‘angel of death’ - or something quite like it.
With diabolical sense of purpose, and an unhurried intensity of destructive envy, Dalle’s almost demonic seeming home-intruder turns Sarah’s lonely Christmas Eve into a night of mortal dread, locked in a gore drenched bathroom. Animation of the unborn baby adds a dimension of CSI styled graphics to the visual impact, and there is clever use of sound effects to build tension and suspense, accentuating an extraordinary violence, which skims along fuzzy borderlines between absolutely nightmarish fantasy and the brutality of a psychopathic reality.
Although it’s a short 85–minute feature, action plays non–stop as visitors to Sarah’s residence only survive a few moments in the confrontations with Dalle’s antagonist. Cruel and gutsy with a disturbing savagery, very memorably using a large pair of scissors as multi–purpose household weaponry, Inside is a smartly constructed and fascinating thriller. Its agonies transform Sarah’s quiet suburbia into a veritable war-zone of wildly inhuman atrocities, without any hints of compromise or moral restraint. It’s a mesmerising hell of torments, but definitely not suitable viewing for any mum-to-be in a delicate emotional condition.
Extras:
- New commentary by Anna Bogutskaya
- New commentary by Elena Lazic
- First
Born - new interview with co-writer/directors Alexandre
Bustillo and Julien Maury
- Labour
Pains - new interview with Alysson Paradis
- A
New Extreme - new interview with producer Franck Ribiere
- Womb
Raider - new interview with cinematographer Laurent Bares
- Reel
Action - new interview with stunt co-ordinator Emmanuel Lanzi
- The Birth Of A Mother - Jenn Adams on Inside
