THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
There are, like that, films which operate on two registers, relating to both the suspense story and the conceptual device, which manage to mix concrete solidity and abstraction, to gradually slip away from the impossible situation. but perhaps plausible to abstraction detached from all contingency. Inside is one of them and it’s a nice surprise.
Vasilis Katsoupis’ second feature film is based on a premise that is both playful and artificial. A burglar, whose name we learn is Nemo, breaks into an ultra-chic New York apartment via the roof. In communication with his accomplices, he sets out in search of the object of the theft, three paintings, including a self-portrait, by Egon Schiele. The apartment is furnished with the bad taste that should characterize ultra-wealth here. In spaces of calculated coldness, there is, among other things, an indoor swimming pool, a greenhouse, a giant aquarium, state-of-the-art designer furniture, modern or contemporary works of art consisting of paintings, objects and various installations.
Epic of survival
Following the automatic activation of a non-deactivated security device, the man finds himself locked in the apartment, unable to leave, condemned to remain there while waiting either to be spotted or to find a way out. To make matters worse, the water and electricity have been cut off, probably by the absent owner, and food is in short supply.
It is therefore a sort of epic of survival that the spectator is summoned to witness the discoveries, efforts and inventions made by the main and only character of the film to get by. Nemo is a shipwrecked person in an apartment, a Robinson Crusoe of confinement forced to find, on site and with the “means at hand”, what to survive and hold on. Man then becomes the object of an experience that the film restores head-on, thus touching on an essential dimension of cinema which has become a pure behavioral study. It is on the fascination of the gesture, its invention and its execution, as much as on a form of suspense that is therefore based Inside.
But the condition for ” person ” (nemo) becoming “someone” again goes through a process of destruction of his environment. By looking for a way out and the conditions for survival (piling up various objects to reach the ceiling, cutting up the furniture, exterminating the fish in the aquarium to make sushi, digging into the wood of the doors in the hope of making a hole), should he not carry out a systematic dismantling of both the functional objects of the apartment and the works of art which furnish it? Willem Dafoe thus embodies to perfection, in a mixture of concentration and physical effort, this formidable figure who is both fragile and demolishing. Cinema therefore rediscovers all the characteristics of an art of expenditure, the enjoyment of the spectator being experienced in a singular experience, that of the spectacle of limitless devastation.
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