"Inside"

by Sean McTiernan

One problem with torture porn is that it’s boring. As cringe-worthy and scientifically dubious as the violent scenes in the new age of splatter are, the rest of the movies tend to be a no-holds-barred explicit look on how things can totally suck. The poorly photographed anonymous characters sleepwalking from scene to scene, marching towards a squishy and meaningless climax, could lead you to believe torture porn leans more towards the “porn” end of its name. The only “torture” is paying to see it and how strongly the man beside you smells of perspiration.

Recently folks have been praising The New Age of French Horror. You can usually recognise these movies as “credible” torture porn. And everyone speaks French in them. That also is a dead giveaway.

This “New Age Of Horror” in France doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, even when you put aside the fact it only consists of about five movies. Martyrs, a grim exercise in worthiness and misery, is admittedly very well-made. Gory as it is though, anyone whose watched it will tell you it’s not really a horror movie. Frontieres is really derivative and actually a bit crap if you watch it again. Suffice to say, if you’ve seen the dinner scene from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you’ve seen a fifth of Frontieres. Watch it over four more times and play some Pink Panther movies over it and you’re sorted. Actually, you should do that anyway, that’d probably be amazing.

Untill today’s movie, the biggest international success of the French New Age of Horror was Haute Tension. As anyone who’s seen Haute Tension will tell you, it’s impossible to tell if it’s good or not. Because, you see, it’s ending is so incredibly, suffocatingly irritating and nonsensical that the common reaction is to jump up once the movie ends and run into the nearest wall until your memory of the past 90 minutes has been wiped.

That pretty much leaves it to Inside to deliver on the high-faultin’ promises of The New Age of French Horror. And deliver it does, harder than you’d ever expect and after it’s done, you’ll be too busy sobbing to think about walls.

There’s only a couple of things you need to know. Sarah and her husband are in a car crash. He dies but she survives. She’s pregnant, and, months later, she is in her house the day before she is due to deliver. A mysterious woman arrives and wants to get inside the house. She’s more persistent than you’d expect…. far, far more persistent.

Not only is that all you need to know, that’s all you should know. Inside is one of the few movies well-made enough to earn its many brutal shock moments and it’s far better you have no idea what’s going on. Even if you’re the kind of person who Googles the plot of a movie to see if it’s “worth it,” you need to make an exception for Inside (and you should also know that everyone hates going to the cinema with you).. It’s the Brian Wilson of artfully made horror movies.

In addition to being crazily gory, it’s a well-paced, artfully-made and actually exciting horror movie. Gore is always pretty good but if you wrap an actual movie around it, that’s a recipe for success. What elevates Inside is how awkward and weird the violence is. No amount of Rube Goldberg murders (see: Saw) can evoke anything approaching the cringe that the clumsiness and practicality of Inside’s characters injects into every scene.

One component of that is that you’re never given a chance to forget Sarah’s pregnancy or think of her as just another horror heroine. Her pregnancy is, as you can guess, an integral part of the movie. The film’s most flashy touch — done with CGI — could easily have turned it into a cheesy nightmare. Every time Sara is pushed or jolted, we’re treated to a view of the fetus inside her getting pushed around too.

Really Sarah’s got very little in common with a normal horror protagonist. She rings the police immediately and does everything a sane person would do in her situation. Sadly for her, she doesn’t have superhuman strength or reflexes either. The Woman, on the other hand, does seem to be stronger than the average crazy lady. Unlike other movie slashers, she didn’t get thrown in a vat of toxic liquid, come back from the dead to seek revenge or get hit by lightning. She’s just insane. And who better to play her than consummate cinema lunatic Béatrice Dalle, of Betty Blue. You could actually view Inside as a sequel to Betty Blue if you wanted. It’s only a bit of a stretch.

It’s dangerous to talk about Inside too much. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a beautiful and mysterious woman leaping out of a bush and kicking the crap out of you. If you were into that. And you should be.

Sean McTiernan has a blog and a Twitter. So does everyone though. He also has a podcast on which he has a nervous breakdown once an episode, minimum. In other words: it’s great for the gym.