Inside



AKA: À l’intérieur

It’s only been four short months after the death of her husband, and widow Sarah is less than a day away from going to the hospital to give birth to their daughter. After losing the father of her child and nearly dying herself, Sarah is still overcome with grief and just wants to be left alone for the night, and not hovered over by her concerned mother or employer. But just hours before she’s scheduled to get picked up, a mysterious stranger shows up on her doorstep wanting to be let in. Sarah denies her entry, but the shadowy figure persists, breaking the glass of the back window. Sarah calls the police who come out to check, but they can find nothing. They check the house and lock her up for the night, with the promise of checking on her again in a couple hours. Sarah is rattled, but thinks everything is fine. But what she doesn’t realize is that the stranger has already made her way into the house, and she has nefarious plans for both Sarah and her unborn child.



Inside is a French horror film from 2007. It is considered to be part new wave French horror, or New French Extremity genre of films which, judging from this film and others like High Tension is, as far as I can tell, just a fancy way of saying this is the French version of a bloody, gore-fest. Much like Grace, Inside is the type of horror movie that should probably come with a warning at the beginning of the film that states something along the lines of “if you are pregnant you should really think twice before watching this film.” Because let me tell you, it is a violent, bloody mess of a movie, that even I thought was a little overly intense in places. And if it made me squeamish at points, I don’t even want to know how a pregnant woman would react to watching a mentally disturbed, creepy lady literally trying to cut a child out of a pregnant woman with a large pair of fabric shears.

Oh, and the film takes place on Christmas Eve, so technically you can count it as a Christmas film. Fun.



Inside and Grace essentially start off the exact same way, with a tragic car accident that results in the death of the husband, and a traumatized and depressed wife who’s getting ready to have a baby. But that’s where the similarities end. Where Grace was a slow-building psychological horror, Inside is a brutal, violent, in-your-face home invasion flick that hits its savage side pretty early on and then stays there for the rest of the film. So if you’re not a fan of slow-burn and are looking for a more intense, fast-paced horror film then you’ve come to the right place. The only “downtime” this film has is the opening few scenes that establish the characters and the scenario, and even those have a vein of underlying tension through them. But once the creepy, gothic Stabby-Stabby Lady shows up things get really violent, really quick, and it only gets worse from there. So if you’re at all squeamish after those first couple of ‘attack’ scenes, just be forewarned that the film is only going to become more…unpleasant from that point on.



Considering how violent the film is, it should come as no surprise that the movie is filled with copious amounts of blood. If the amount of blood and guts is your barometer for a good horror movie, then know that this is the type of film that would make even some of the most die-hard gorehounds feel compelled to rise and give a standing ovation at the end. Various body parts are stabbed, sliced, or gouged out. Arteries are nicked… People are set on fire… Heads explode. It’s just a huge mess, to the point where I don’t think any part of Sarah’s home wasn’t covered in some form of blood splatter by the time the film ended.



The acting is also about what you would expect to see in a film like this: very dramatic, intense and often frantic. Alysson Paradis plays a victim to the best of her ability, but beyond some random bursts of initiative I feel like the film didn’t really give her much to work with for the majority of the movie. Which is too bad, because those random bursts showed some promise. Instead, the star of the show is Béatrice Dalle as the crazy, gothic Stabby-Stabby Lady (Look, she’s never given a name, so that’s what I’m calling her). Dalle is easily the best thing in this film. She is equal parts manic and ridiculously violent, but also deceptively cunning and conniving. In short, she plays crazy perfectly, and is compelling enough to maybe even get some people to add her to their personal pantheon of “most disturbing realistic movie villains.”


I’m still not sure what the point of this particular outfit was, but I’ll admit it does make a nice visual.

All that said though, I did notice some issues that irked me quite a bit. The movie starts out fine, but once the violence ramps up a lot of things like “consistency” and “logic” fly right out the window. For instance, the movie can’t seem to decide if crazy, gothic Stabby-Stabby Lady is unusually strong or not. There are certain scenes where she shows deceptive levels of strength, yet at the same time she struggles to get to Sarah when the only thing standing in her way is a flimsy bathroom door. We’re talking “I can stab through this thing with a broken piece of mirror” level of sturdiness here. If the crazy, gothic Stabby-Stabby Lady was as strong as the movie suggested then a couple of swift kicks should have really been enough to take down that obstacle.


My friend “accidentally” kicked a hole in her sister’s door when she was sixteen. A grown-ass woman wearing boots should have no problem.

Then the police show up, and if you know anything about police and horror movies then you know as soon as you see them that you’re about to witness some serious incompetence. But these guys? These guys are ridiculously bad at their jobs. When they show up in the middle of the bloodbath they manage to catch crazy, gothic Stabby-Stabby Lady off guard, and the first thing they should have done was properly detain her. Did they? No. One guy goes upstairs, leaving the other guy to detain her, and he does such a piss-poor job of following proper procedure (he didn’t even try to pat her down or make her move her hands so he could see them) that he immediately gets stabbed. And for some reason the movie doesn’t want us to believe that sound carries in this house, so the other guy can’t hear his partner loudly dying, even though he’s only a scant few feet away.


His partner is literally right below that railing he’s standing at. Like, 6ft away… I can’t even with this movie.

Now, for some reason, there also happens to be a third cop in this party of nincompoops that the other two left in the car with a prisoner. So naturally when he hears a gunshot he immediately jumps into action. Does he call for backup, you ask? At least take a few necessary seconds to inform the station that shots have been fired and people might need medical attention? NO! This idiot’s first instinct is to handcuff his prisoner to his waist, and go into the house with no idea WTF is going on, and at this point the level of stupidity on display here has just become insulting.

And that’s not even taking into account smaller annoyances and believability issues, like Sarah being unable to recognize her own mother’s voice, people inexplicably being able to move and fight after being stabbed and/or shot in the head, or that whole ridiculous ordeal regarding the freaking circuit breaker. So in some ways I feel like the movie was going out of its way and genuinely trying to piss me off.



As entertaining as I found Inside, I’m kind of surprised how well rated it is. I mean, on a technical level it’s great. The acting, the visuals, the sound…It’s all good. But the story really seems to fall apart not long after the bad guy shows up. After that it feels like the focus is solely on the blood, gore and whatever shock value the film feels it can achieve, whether it makes sense or not. The movie still remains bloody and highly tense, but as the stupidity levels seemingly rise, a lot of that tension slowly transitions from “Oh, no! How will Sarah get out of this!” to “Oh, gods, what ridiculous thing will I witness next?” So if you’re looking for a solid plot, know that the story here sort of starts to fall apart by the half-way point. But if all you’re looking for is blood, and wet, ooey, gooey guts-y parts, then you’ll probably be content with this film.

Inside is available on a variety of streaming services.

Inside is also available on DVD and Bluray, though they all seem to be imports.

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