WILLEM Dafoe slowly going mad is not an official film genre, but it should be. In his latest psychological caper, Dafoe plays Nemo, a high-end art thief.
Breaking into a luxury penthouse to steal three artworks by Egon Schiele, things quickly turn awry for Nemo when he attempts to leave after failing to find Schiele’s self-portrait.
A glitch in the penthouse’s security network locks him in, with his accomplices outside leaving him to fend for himself. The glitch also causes the internal thermostat to go haywire, while also cutting off the main water supply.
Over the course of several days – and presumably weeks – Nemo attempts to survive on the limited food in the penthouse, while battling against the increasing temperature that turns the penthouse into an oven, before dropping and turning the place into a freezer. He also has to figure out how to escape.
Amateur hour
Inside is considered a “chamber film”– films with only one main location, with small deviations in the set.
Most chamber films involve a very small group of actors – a famous one being Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight – but some go even smaller, with just one actor in the entire film, such as Tom Hardy in Locke.
Compared to every other type of films, these require a very strong cast, excellent writing, and tight direction. Without these three working in tandem, the film will fall apart.
For Inside, unfortunately it only has the cast – in this case, literally only Dafoe – down to a tee.
As for the rest of the film, though it presents a unique setting where everything is working against the character, the writing still flounders.
While everything imaginable in that contained setting happens, ironically, nothing advances the story, while Nemo – from the start to the end – remains a blank slate; viewers will not learn anything about his background beyond his opening lines, which leads to a two-dimensional character without any relatability or development.
Held captive
Despite the situation Nemo is placed in, where it is heavily implied that the brown “whiskey” he begins taking swigs of is his own dark, dehydrated urine, Inside never commits to truly pushing Nemo’s sanity to its limit.
That said, Dafoe still commits to the role, as much as he did in Antichrist or more recently, The Lighthouse. It’s this distinction – Dafoe’s presence – that makes the almost two-hour-long film bearable.
The weak writing pushes attention towards Dafoe’s performance, singularly, and nothing else; not even on Nemo.
Dafoe summons attention through his performance, where viewers become invested in seeing the resolution to Inside, and then it happens; the shoddily written ending becomes the biggest crime in the film.
Frankly put, Inside does not really have a proper ending in the sense that writer Ben Hopkins and director Vasilis Katsoupis just seemingly gave up with giving Nemo any sort of resolution.
All said and done, the only thing Inside has going for it is Dafoe carrying the entire film on his back.
Inside is streaming on Peacock.