Inside (Road to Halloween)

After enjoying "Martyrs" I had a little look out for some other French horror title. I looked into "Swtichblade Romance", which I had already seen and enjoyed, but decided that I wanted something new. I eventually settled on "À l'intérieur", the English translation for this is "Inside". I read into the plot and it became a must watch.

In a weird start, the film begins inside the womb of a pregnant woman. You can hear her voice explaining how the baby is safe inside her. Then without any warning the fetus is thrown towards the camera at high speed and floats slowly back, not moving as the womb slowly fills with blood. The film fades in and you see a car crash, and inside the smaller crashed car is a pregnant woman; Sarah. Her husband is dead, she is bleeding heavily and the status of the baby is unknown.

The film flashes forward four months to Sarah lying in a hospital bed having a sonogram. It seems that the baby is fine and will be delivered within the next few days. She is advised that she will be admitted tomorrow and she should go home and get some rest.

Sarah gets home and settled in for the night. Just as she is about to fall asleep, there is a banging at that door. It is a woman asking for some help, but Sarah informs her that she can't because her husband is asleep. We know this isn't true and that she is just nervous, but the stranger outside shouldn't know any better...right? Wrong. She knows all about Sarah, her husband, the accident and the baby. As time passes by the exchanges get more heated and the stranger breaks a window, but eventually manages to make her way into the house. From here on in, it only gets scarier.

I was immediately impressed by "Inside" because of its ability to handle a large amount of exposition and make it easily understood without going into large amounts of detail. It is not thrown in your face, but it flows naturally and allows the viewer to take in the information at a good pace. Once the action starts though, you can pretty much disregard any sort of characterization you thought was going to be relevant.

Once the stranger makes it into the house, I found myself on edge all of the time. There was no extreme violence or jumpy parts to catch you off guard. All they needed to do was to have a figure in the shadows looking over Sarah while she is sitting alone. It scared me on a level that felt very familiar, and I realized that it was because there was not supernatural element to this. It is not an impossible feat for this film to become a reality; a fact that I think makes this film all the scarier.

Around half way through, the film takes a somewhat enormous leap from subtle scares to unspoken violence. The gore in "Inside" is frequent and graphic, actually making me feel kind of ill from time to time and I normally have no issues with movie gore. I can only speculate that the reason for my discomfort is that, like the home invasion plot, the violence was very realistic.

"Inside" is yet another notch on the belt of French horror. A graphic, sickening, horrifying notch. Out of the three films I have watched from France in this genre I have been impressed with all of them. I would think that this film would make any horror movie night a lot better. If you are looking for a violent/psychological horror, this is going to be another one that is worthwhile. Not quite as good as "Martyrs", but still awesome.

Rating 4 out of 5

See it if you liked:
Panic Room
Vacancy
The Strangers

What does IMDB say?

Review by Stephen King