Is ‘Inside’ pretentious or are we just uncultured?

So I kind of wanted to talk about that movie Inside with Willem Dafoe.

I thought this film was supposed to be pretentious and really contemplative and there’s gonna be metaphors and meanings hidden in the narrative. So I’m like, okay, let’s pay attention. 

Is Inside pretentious or are we just uncultured?

Willem Dafoe, played by Willem Dafoe, has broken into this penthouse to steal artwork, and the entire place is filled with stuff you’d find at the MOMA. So I think okay, well if that’s the first thing that this film tells us, then maybe pay attention to the art. Maybe there’s something here with the obvious outer layer with the artwork.

But here’s the thing. I’m a fucking dunce, so I don’t actually know about anything about art. But I’m trying to keep up, so I study the mise-en-scene as best as I can. There’s one painting with 12 blue dots of different sizes, and a wall-sized mural of a man in overalls sitting back, then there’s a large photo of the owner of the penthouse, his daughter, and the dog standing in front of the earlier overalls portrait. So now that mural is here twice so I’m thinking, okay, there’s got to be some meaning here.

The first statement spoken by Dafoe’s character is a sort of thesis about art, and he tells us this anecdote from when he was a kid. His teacher asked him what he would save from a burning house, and he was like, “I’d save my cat and I’d say to save a CD and I’d save my sketchbook.” His cat dies, he loses his CD, but he says, ‘art is for keeps’. So I keep thinking that there’s definitely something here. 

But I don’t know anybody who would have figured out this whole art thing right off the bat, because who knows art that deep, that well? But I’m sure somebody knows enough to like, put it on online and explain it to us after some thought. But that’s a little weird, right? Like, we watch a movie and then there’s a homework assignment involved. We have to go and find out what you were watching after the fact. That’s actually pretentious. 

That’s not just ‘this movie is really deep and much better than Shazam’ pretentious. 

That’s ‘you’re dumb if you don’t get the art’ pretentious. 

So despite this, at this point I’m still thinking that there might have been a layer there about the art that I missed. But then you watch the story unfold, and the story is as simple as the trailer. Willem Defoe is stuck in this penthouse, and he’s going insane, but that’s something that he’s known for, so I kind of know what to expect as a baseline. 

The film does a decent job of setting up the penthouse, and the cinematography is really great at setting things up. And I know that some thought went into putting this film together. For example, at one point, Dafoe breaks into a pantry, and there’s this slab of meat curing in the midst of all the other food. A while later, we see the mostly-eaten slab of meat, so far later that you may have even forgotten or missed it in the first place.

But nothing really progresses. It’s just that straightforward. Dafoe go cray cray. Fin.

Is Willem Dafoe Jesus?

As Dafoe tries to break out of the penthouse early on in the film he looks up and finds a skylight and it’s not clear if it’s a skylight or if it’s just a really fancy light because it’s a very large, cubic light fixture. The music swells and there’s a really distinct audio cue here telling us to pay attention. As if we hadn’t already been fucking doing that.

So he piles up a bunch of the furniture like the tower of Babel and he climbs 30 feet in the air, breaking his way out. but you know, I don’t know why it was so hard to do so. First he had to first get through the frame, then he had to find some way to unscrew the bolts. then he as to unscrew the bolts. Like 12 of them. And this whole process takes the entirety of the film, the many months that the guy is stuck in there. 

Then at the end, he knocks out the big window pane, the camera is pointing at the ground so you see it crash and then the shot cuts back up and you don’t see his feet disappearing through the skylight, but you see some movement inside the skylight or the light fixture, whatever it is. It’s hard to tell if it was just a very large light fixture or if it was actually a skylight because you never look up when it’s dark out. You never look up when the night has fallen and it goes dark when the sun goes out when the sun goes down. 

So at the end of the movie, after all this crap goes down, you’re left with this question. Did he go through the light or not? Is this just part of his insanity? It’s an annoying, basic trope. And all of this culminated so poorly that my first thought as soon as the movie ended was, “well, that was a waste of time.”

And there’s other stuff that feels like an allegory for something biblical. At one point he sets off the sprinkler system and the water falls and falls and falls and at one point, I’m like… the flood? The ark?

After this happens, the aforementioned painting with the 12 blue dots of various sizes is carried by Willem Dafoe on his back from one place to another. It’s a large four feet by six feet painting and he’s carrying it on his back and you see your watching dafoe carry it from behind. So I think to myself, what if you had flipped around this view, what would it look like? It would look like Willem Dafoe bent over with his arms split out wide to his sides as he’s carrying the painting on his back.

And I’m thinking to myself, wouldn’t that image of Willem carrying the painting Look a lot like Jesus Christ carrying the cross? Or the image of Jesus being nailed to the cross with his arms out wide? 12 blue dots represent the twelve disciples? This is a bit of a stretch, I know. 

But maybe… maybe inside is a Jesus allegory.

Or maybe this movie is really bad.. 

4/10.

If you get a chance to watch it and want the fleeting sense of victory of having overcome this film, then absolutely go for it. But it’s really not worth your time. Neither was Shazam, by the way. That movie was hot garbage, even by the usual standards.

PPS I actually wrote most of this review by voice recording it first and then editing the transcription. Let me know if you’re enjoying the more conversational tone or if there are problems in readability. 

You can watch the film in limited theaters currently.

Wondering how my rating system works? Let me explain!