Starting as a high-concept heist film before then turning into a Blumhouse-lite survival scenario, Vasilis Katsoupis’s Inside is ultimately neither of those things. And, in the end, whether or not it achieves escape velocity from genre limitations though overt sociopolitical commentary is questionable. Many will be perhaps understandably more interested in seeing whether Willem Dafoe’s high-end art thief can survive a killer apartment than the film’s investigation of issues regarding the purpose of art and its ownership.
Katsoupis’s sleek, claustrophobic film starts with the roar of an unseen helicopter. We first see Nemo (Dafoe) in a maintenance worker’s boiler suit, darting through a luxury penthouse. It’s a breathless opening. Nemo races from room to room, following the directions of his handler on a walkie-talkie as the minutes count down. After having grabbed nearly all of the Egon Schiele paintings that he came for, Nemo enters what he thinks is the alarm code to get out of the penthouse. But a sudden malfunction causes the security system to lock down the entire apartment. Hearing only “you’re on your own” from his handler, Nemo is trapped with a fortune in art but shut inside an inanimate structure that seems determined to murder him.
Nemo’s predicament is cleanly laid out in this precisely imagined and shot film. Though it has clearly been lavished with attention, the penthouse hardly seems like the residence of a human being. The pantry and refrigerator are mostly empty. The taps are off, leaving a decorative pool and fish tank as Nemo’s future sources of water. The malfunctioning control system has also begun to crank the temperature up and down seemingly at random, leaving Nemo shivering under a blanket or sweating and nearing dehydration. After a failed stab at cutting through the ornately carved wooden front door, Nemo resigns himself to being in the place for a while.
Once Nemo really understands his predicament, Inside begins to resemble a less playful take on The Martian set on Billionaire’s Row in Midtown Manhattan. Nemo identifies the limitations of his world and starts to work the problem. Katsoupis balances the action between Nemo’s mundane day-to-day existence—scraping mold off aged bread, making pasta without a working stove, recovering drinking water from the automatic watering system for the apartment’s indoor plants—and his complex attempts to engineer an escape from this luxury bunker.
Ben Hopkins’s script emphasizes action over character and relies a bit too much on the arbitrary nature of the security system’s malfunctions, which allows for new plot wrinkles at convenient times. The mechanics of survival are leavened in the earlier stretches by humor (the high-tech talking refrigerator for some reason plays “Macarena”) and later on by Nemo’s isolation leading to boredom-reducing theatrics (from pretending that he’s performing in a cooking show to inventing stories around the people he sees but cannot talk to in the security cameras).
Dafoe’s mix of taut physicality and vulnerability helps generate tension in some otherwise unremarkable scenes, though you may wonder if the character’s moments in extremis might have had greater impact if Nemo was played by an actor less comfortable with going feral. A surprising amount of drama is milked out of Nemo building a wobbly tower of Babel out of scavenged furniture in an attempt to chisel his way out through the skylight.
But while it’s admirable that the filmmakers are aiming higher than a simple survival narrative, their attempts to graft greater meaning onto the story don’t have as much impact as intended. What little backstory we’re given for Nemo comes in a voiceover about the three things that mattered to him when he was a kid: “Cats die, music fades, but art is for keeps.” This, along with his occasionally drawing in a sketchbook and adding his own artwork to the apartment walls indicates that Nemo is, if not a thief with a heart of gold, then a thief with the soul of an artist. Looking at a smug self-portrait of the apartment’s owner, Nemo says, “boo.”
A final voiceover from Nemo that serves as Inside’s coda provides a clear statement about the merits of the ultrarich hording art away from people in their Olympian fortresses. This not only makes for an admirably populist sentiment, but it also makes it easy to imagine a different version of Katsoupis’s film where Nemo escapes and donates the stolen art to a public museum. But it’s also a far too neat a wrap-up to an otherwise enigmatic story.
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Expected much better reviewing on this excellent film. It is clearly a clever take on the role of art in our life, but more importantly on vitality, action , in a dying Western world, and where cinema has barely exposed its possibilities as a mature art beyond the dumb Hollywoodian use of it. The sociopolitical commentary is obviously very secondary, a distant background.