The first thing we see in Inside is a fetus floating snugly in its womb - then something happens and the baby hits the camera lens with its face, a cloud of blood invading the frame. Extremely unconvincing CGI aside, it's one hell of a way to kick off a movie.
The cause for the baby's discomfort soon becomes apparent as we get our first glimpse of our pretty pregnant protagonist, Sarah (Alysson Paradis), in the aftermath of a horrific car crash. She's survived; Her partner, unfortunately, didn't.
As it turns out, her baby survived the crash as well, something Sarah seems a little ambivalent about when we catch up with her a few months later. It's the day before Christmas, riots are rocking suburban Paris, and it's the day before she's due to go to the hospital to have her baby delivered. Sarah goes around in a haze of depression, still clearly struggling to come to terms with facing the rest of her life - and looming maternity - alone.
That night, a mysterious woman (Beatrice Dalle) knocks at her door and asks to be let in - and later appears in her garden. Sarah is justifiably unnerved, enough to call the police, who promise to patrol the area and check in later. It's no good; As soon as she goes to sleep, the stranger breaks in and wanders her house, watches her sleep, brandishes a very nasty pair of scissors a little too close to her belly...
After a brutal, wince-inducing attack at about the half-hour mark, Sarah ends up locked in the bathroom while the stranger paces outside, demanding Sarah gives herself up for butchery. The movie never lets up, going through a handful of established characters that meet various horrifying ends. It's a relentlessly brutal, extremely gory and harrowing home invasion that quickly leaves poor Sarah covered in blood from head to toe.
Besides being one of the poster girls for the horror branch of the French New Extremity 'movement', Inside marked the debut of the writer/directing duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, who've since built up a pretty cool and varied body of work within the genre. This one remains their bloodiest and their best.
It's very much of a piece with the other horror movies from the 00s, except much better than most. The CGI baby - who pops up multiple times to give the film an even more jagged edge - is a great bad-taste concept, but unfortunately the execution is so laughably bad that it counts against the movie even as it makes it more memorable. The same goes for other scenes where CGI is used, including a conceptually cool but visually botched face-torching moment.
Elsewhere, though, the computer imagery is not that bad, mostly because the film wisely limits their time on screen to very quick flashes. The more prevalent practical gore effects are appropriately disgusting and over the top - expect blood to cascade down stairs and shoot out in almost comical high pressure from puncture wounds. There's face explosions, disembowelments, and more stabbings than you can shake a pair of oversized scissors at. The carnage is graphic, extremely well made and brutal enough to undercut a gorehound's glee. Almost.
More than anything else, it's an excellent and particularly bloody single-location slasher. The script hits a couple of bum notes but mostly nails the give-and-take between suspense and mayhem all the way to a fucking excellent, bleak-as-all-hells finale.
The two women at the center of the film are great characters - one melancholy and relatable in her orneriness, the other one inscrutable and batshit insane; There's more than a little Audition in this movie's DNA, including gearing up its psycho in a memorable getup that almost doubles as fetish gear.
Visually It avoids the boring, desaturated look that most American horror of the time was affecting by bathing everything in soft, mostly amber lights (cinematographer: Laurent Barés). Like most Bustillo/Maury joints, it's fairly stylish and very energetic.
Highly recommended as long as you have a stomach for this sort of thing.
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