You may have caught the trailer for Inside the other day. It looked interesting, as Willem Dafoe gets stuck in a penthouse as he tries to steal some artwork. The official synopsis is:

“Nemo, a high-end art thief, is trapped in a New York penthouse after his heist doesn’t go as planned. Locked inside with nothing but priceless works of art, he must use all his cunning and ingenuity to survive.”

Inside stars Dafoe, Gene Bervoets, Eliza Stuyck, Andrew Blumenthal and that’s it. The movie focuses solely on Dafoe trapped in this huge apartment. It is written and directed by Vasillis Katsoupis, with the screenplay finished by Ben Hopkins.

I will be touching on spoilers for this as I will have to explain my score at the end. I have said it before, but I love movies with a minimal cast and getting to see how such a contained story is played out. Inside is one of those movies, with pretty much just Dafoe by himself for the entire film.

Dafoe plays Nemo, an art thief. He’s breaking into a very expensive penthouse to steal some paintings. While he’s in there, the alarm is triggered. He has a guy who’s helping him on the outside, but nothing can be done.

This is where the movie gets weird. Defoe triggers the alarms, but nobody comes to his aid. You’d have thought an alarm going off would have sent the police along, or even just one of the guys who worked in the apartment complex, but nobody answers the call.

Spoilers

If you watch the trailer, you get the impression that the film is set up so that he is inside an art installation himself. With the fact that nobody came when the alarms went off, this is exactly what I thought was happening.

At one point he starts a fire, but again, no one comes to his aid.

The rest of the movie now focuses on Defoe slowly going mad as he is trapped inside. There’s no running water, no food, and no sense of the outside, so he is stuck. The first two acts of the film are really interesting. How would you cope if you were trapped inside somewhere and couldn’t get out?

It reminded me of 127 Hours. In that movie, James Franco is stuck but he relies on his imagination to wonder what would happen if he wasn’t trapped by the rock. Inside is very much the same. There are moments where Dafoe is living in reality, but also times when he’s using his imagination.

Major Spoilers

The third act is really where the film lets itself down, particularly the ending. You find out he’s not in an art installation, but genuinely trapped.

The ending is very surreal and you’re not quite sure exactly what the meaning is. I had to research to find some different interpretations of it. This annoyed me. There is nothing wrong with being open to interpretation, but having to do extra work simply to understand a movie? There may be some people out there who watch the ending and completely get it, or view it a different way.

Overall

Overall, Inside is a clever movie. However, it is let down by its own script and trying to be just too clever at times. The ending was just a bit too complex and lets it down.

It was very much like the ending of Inception where you had to make your own mind up, although Inception did it much better.

Inside is an interesting movie, but I can only give it a middle-of-the-read score. Inside is now streaming only in the US at the moment.