When Willem Dafoe showed up in the first trailer I saw for “Inside,” I thought, “Now that’s good casting.”
Director Vasilis Katsoupis’s psychological thriller follows Nemo (Dafoe), an art thief who ends up trapped in an ostentatious New York penthouse during a heist gone wrong, and remains stuck there for an unidentified amount of time. Besides a few ancillary characters, Dafoe is basically the only presence we see on screen. He’s built for this type of thing, with one of those faces that lends itself well to inner turmoil and terror – a face that was built to slowly go mad, weathered and almost mystically wise, like he has been alive for thousands of years and seen things that mere men could only dream of.
So, you’ve got Willem Dafoe, trapped inside a menacingly pretentious apartment, surrounded by a series of off-putting art pieces, going stir crazy for a little under two hours. What could go wrong?
Apparently, a lot. Dafoe’s casting isn’t enough to make “Inside” work. The film’s action is split between Nemo losing his grip on reality and his attempts to escape from his prison. Unfortunately, the film focuses on the former without ever truly delving into Nemo’s psyche and can’t meld the psychological with the physical in a way that’s specific or holds interest. The filmmaking itself is far from compelling and doesn’t do much to supplement Dafoe’s performance, rendering “Inside” a lost opportunity – something that could have been titillating, instead just a bit boring.
“Inside” opens with a repeated refrain from Nemo, one that gives us a tiny window into his inner life. When he was a kid, a teacher asked him what he would save if his house was on fire. Instead of choosing to save his family members, he decided upon his cat, an AC/DC album, and his sketchbook. This is one of the only things we learn about Nemo over the course of the film, yet his descent into madness is treated as somehow revelatory, as truly unmooring for this man. As time drags on, he experiences multiple hallucinations that purport to have some deeper meaning, or divulge some truth about him, but none of that is grounded in any real characterization.
These haphazardly metaphorical visions lack spark because we have no real sense of who Nemo is or what the visions mean for him. The more engrossing parts of the film involve Nemo’s attempts to break himself out of the home – one that’s apparently equipped with the security of a bank – but the film spends less time there than one might hope.
For as much as the film fails to find its footing, Dafoe does give an arresting performance. In one particular sequence, as Nemo starts to slip further into madness, he gives a stand-up performance to an imaginary audience. Dafoe delivers the joke, concerning a little girl whose mother makes her the same thing for dinner every single night, with the cadence of a comic who has lost the plot. He unnervingly dials his vocal and physical choices up and up and up, before you inevitably realize there’s no punchline in sight. But the camera does nothing to support Dafoe’s unraveling.
Instead, Katsoupis leans on a long line of slow, push-in shots on different parts of the apartment to create a sense of foreboding that lacks substance, opting for an empty, vaguely ominous tone instead of something more potent or specific. The technique might help create a sense of tension the first time it’s used, but by the fiftieth shot, it has lost its power.
It doesn’t help that as much as Nemo ostensibly cares about art, the film doesn’t seem to have any interest in art at all. “Cats die, music fades, but art is for keeps,” Nemo says about what he chooses to save from his hypothetically burning house. But barring one climactic sequence, the film rarely takes advantage of the strange artwork that litters the walls of Nemo’s new prison. By film’s end, you’re meant to get the sense that Nemo’s love of art has transformed into something more sinister, that the things he so loved have turned on him. But, beyond those long, unspectacular push-in shots, there’s nothing in the film to support Dafoe’s transformation.
“Inside” seems to want to be about something more than just a guy stuck in a penthouse trying to get out. So much so, that it forgets to lend focus to both the guy in question and the psychical space at hand, trying to create tension out of a shallow grave of ideas.