With an intriguing set up, Vasilis Katsoupis’ Inside features a captivating performance by Willem Dafoe as an art thief trapped in a billionaire’s penthouse. However, its unfocused use of space, plot, and theme render it mostly dull until it eventually peters out instead of offering any kind of discernible ending, let alone a cathartic one. Whatever it hopes to say about the meaning of art and materialism it says in scattered spurts which rarely add up to a satisfying whole. It approaches its one-location survival story much the same way, leading to similar results.
Set in a New York skyrise, Inside casts Dafoe as Nemo, one member of an otherwise-unseen heist crew, and a character whose opening voiceover hints at his undying love of paintings. This gives him something of a personal connection, at least in theory, to the numerous works of art he’s been sent to steal, when – with help of his cohorts over walkie talkies – he breaks into an enormous luxury apartment while its haughty owner is overseas for several months. Things go awry, and Nemo is unable to either exit the penthouse or call for help, leaving him trapped in a high-tech prison that slowly begins to fail him.
Katsoupis and screenwriter Ben Hopkins are adept at setting up physical hurdles, just as Dafoe is stellar at portraying subtle annoyance that eventually turns into desperation the longer he’s indoors. Food and water are limited, and Nemo must contend with the absurdity of “Macarena” blaring over loudspeakers each time he opens the scantly stocked refrigerator – one of just a few effective comedic gags.
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However, once Inside lays its roadmap of potential hurdles, from dwindling supplies and broken plumbing to a thermostat on the fritz, it rarely returns its focus to any of these issues as continued problems. Instead, the edit (by Lambis Haralambidis) treats them merely as tidbits of information – the kind which you might recall and wonder about once they’ve been off-screen for lengthy periods – rather than as evolving elements of Nemo’s confining environment. Inside’s structure is almost too mechanical to leave a lasting impact; dramatic hurdles, like a lack of proper toilet facilities or dental hygiene, are set up clearly, but Inside’s idea of “payoff” simply means a single shot to get us up to speed on these problems once time has passed. It has little sense of continuity in between, rendering it less of an ongoing story and more of a checklist.
The passage of time in Inside is yet another oddity. While it’s unclear just how long Nemo spends in this apartment – the seasons change enough outside the window that it’s conceivably several months – there’s little care for what time actually feels like for its protagonist, and how it stretches or contracts from his point of view. It’s simply another logistical screenplay element unfolding in the background rather than something experienced through human eyes, or through its toll on the human form. Dafoe’s performance is physically painstaking and emotionally introspective as Nemo is driven further into isolation. However, few filmmaking elements complement his work.
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It’s hard not to think of Inside as a pandemic lockdown movie in spirit, one meant to reflect familiar frustrations and feelings of isolation; Nemo even finds comfort in people-watching, by tuning into live security footage of people all around the building. However, cinematographer Steve Annis’ camera rarely works in tandem with the space to enhance Nemo’s emotions or his physical experience. The penthouse seldom feels uncomfortable; it’s shot neither claustrophobically, like its walls are closing in, nor like its emptiness is truly vast.
The soundscape does, on occasion, enhance the idea that Nemo might slowly be losing his mind, but Katsoupis and Hopkins’ conception of this idea never comes to fruition beyond fleeting phantasmagorical imagery. We see the outside effects, but we’re never allowed a window into Nemo’s psychology; we see the “what” of his fractured visions, but Inside is rarely concerned with presenting them in a manner that suggests a “why.” Dafoe’s frequent voiceover (and even his spoken lines, to no one in particular) often hints at scattered thoughts about modern art, both as status symbols and things which people may hold personally dear. In fact, one of the paintings Nemo is sent to steal happens to be an expensive self-portrait, which inherently rides the lines between these two outlooks. However, this tension never comes to the fore, no matter how long Nemo spends watching and considering the art around him – or creating his own, whether in the form of ritual as he slips into a more primal existence, or by repurposing furniture to build enormous structures in the hopes of reaching a vent in the ceiling.
Despite having numerous paintings and sculptures scattered across its space, and despite its character frequently alluding to deeper artistic thoughts and feelings, Inside has little to no perspective on modern art. And yet, it spends so much of its 105-minute runtime ruminating on the subject that it leaves little room to establish the urgency of Nemo’s situation the further it goes on.
It may recall other films which are similar in concept, like Danny Boyle’s wilderness-survival drama 127 Hours, or more pertinently, Vikramaditya Motwane’s Trapped, a 2017 Indian thriller also featuring a character stuck in a high-rise apartment. But these comparisons feel almost unfair, since both Boyle and Motwane quickly and effectively establish a balance between the characters themselves and the stakes of their respective situations. Katsoupis, in contrast, struggles to visually string together the handful of ideas that make up Hopkins’ already scattered screenplay, yielding a story that buckles under the weight of its faux-profound ending, which not only lacks momentum, but meaning. The result is a film that you could narrate or re-edit in practically any order, but no matter what, it would be just as plain.