No movie has ever encapsulated the two words "beautiful violence," better than Inside. Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo along with their cinematographer Laurent Bares craft a movie violent enough to make Halloween Kills look like a cartoon. I have never seen the intricacies they go to. Not quite as over the top as the blood you would see in a Takashi Miike movie and not as fantastical as the blood in a Lucio Fulci this is the best that intense violence has ever looked on screen to me. It is made better by the dim natural lighting throughout the house, the predominant setting of this movie. That contrasts with the bright lighting in the bathroom which is another big set of the movie. The horror is terrifying. This has one of my favorite scenes ever where villain looks like a ghost floating away in a nightmare...except it isn't a nightmare. Scissors, guns, needles, and fire have never seemed so scary and devastating in a movie and that is also punctuated by the suspense this movie has as you wait in anticipation for the next violent moment as the movie never relents. I wouldn't want this movie to be any less visceral considering the subject matter. No movie has ever looked better to me.
Synopsis: Four months after the death of her husband, a woman on the brink of motherhood (Alysson Paradis) is tormented in her home by a strange, scissor-wielding woman (Beatrice Dalle) who wants her unborn baby.
Right away the style is seen and the atmosphere is felt. In the opening car accident scene I enjoy the little details. The windshield wipers that are still running. The blood on Sarah (Alysson Paradis), some of which is dried and dark red and black because of coagulation. The rain added to the ambience. That goes on into the opening credits where we see the titles with a background of blood being washed back and forth and you can see details like how thick it is and the bubbles and stuff. I can't think of any other movie that shows blood like this. I may sound like Michael C. Hall from Dexter talking about the blood patterns throughout this movie but that is part of why I enjoy it so much. I do like how we get to know Sarah early on. She has a turbulent relationship with her mother Louise (Nathalie Roussel). There is a great scene of her going to take pictures in the park and seeing a family together and you see a close up of her with the scars on her face and that is a reminder of what she went through and how her husband is dead. Her baby is overdue and she turns down her mother's offer to come stay with her on Christmas Eve. Her boss, Jean-Pierre (Francois-Regis Marchasson) offers to drive her to the hospital the next day. I do enjoy the nurse in the hospital coming over to her and saying how hard the first baby is. Though nothing in the world is going to be as hard as this birth is going to be for Sarah...
When Sarah gets home she develops some of the photos she took in the park and has a daydream sequence of sorts where she has a romantic moment with her husband holding her and her baby. She also has a nightmare where the baby comes out of her mouth. While these scenes aren't necessary they add to a nightmare logic atmosphere early on. That pays off more when the intruder, the Woman (Beatrice Dalle) shows up. She at first knocks on the door asking to come in and use the phone. Sarah shows some intelligence by not letting her in as she is defenseless in her situation. The baby is priority to her. Just as the woman is about to leave she calls Sarah on her lie about her husband being home asleep and says that her husband is dead. Sarah later sees the woman standing by her backyard window. Again the rain adds such an ambience to this. You can almost feel that 40 degree December rain here. There is another great visual when she lights a cigarette revealing part of her face. Beatrice Dalle is one of those women like Bonnie Aarons who can look attractive, but she's also quite strange looking and they shoot her like she's something out of a nightmare. The dim lighting combined with her dark hair and black outfit are a good combination for making her look like a monster. Before she leaves again she punches the window making a crack in the glass. Sarah eventually calls the cops but when they go to check on her there is no sign of the woman.
When the kills come in this movie they are brutal, bloody, and a great payoff of suspense. There are some scenes that are surprising, others where the weapon is lingered on for a second before the kill happens. The woman manages to get a gun at some point and during a sequence in the dark she manages to put the gun against someone's head before they can react. That is one moment we don't actually see, we just hear what happens. There are two great kills with needles, one being a knitting needle. One amazing headshot where the side of someone's face gets blown off. There is one awesome moment with fire where the results are some awesome burn effects. There is one great kill with scissors, and one great kill with a knife. Both of those are great because they do different things I haven't seen. The person who gets killed with the scissors gets stabbed in the leg and the throat, which has a bloody result. That doesn't kill them however, and the woman suffocates them with a pillow and stabs through it. The result is a bloodied face that is all red after and it looks awesome. The same thing happens to Sarah when someone is shot in front of her. This movie was shot in sequence and that works for how messed up the wardrobe and the location gets. Throughout the movie Sarah's face gets redder and redder. Her dress gets redder and redder. I've never seen such attention to detail because there will be certain spots of blood I notice whether it is on her dress, the olive green walls, the white bathroom with the bright lighting, and the stairs where the blood just gets more and more and shooting in sequence allows for those details. I love the music in this movie too. There are some great stingers during suspense scenes where someone is attacked and that is when the stinger plays to pay off that tension. The piano and string music throughout is great. There are some droning type of instruments that are great as well.
An example of how Sarah's dress looks throughout, and also the blood effects on her face and the door. Note the bright lighting in the bathroom I was talking about.
A look at Sarah's face later in the movie after the headshot she gets the splash of.
Beatrice Dalle as the Woman. Note her magnetic and also dark look with hair and clothes and also the blood all over the walls.
One of the best headshots ever. Enough said.
Spoiler Section
Sarah at one point wakes up from a dream. The woman is standing right behind her and you don't hear her move away and she moves away slowly like a ghost and into the shadow of the room behind her. It's one of the best scenes ever. Sarah had called Jean-Pierre to come over to look at the photos to see if he could enhance them. She notices that the Woman had been stalking her while developing the photos she took during the day earlier. Sarah goes to sleep and the Woman attacks her with medical scissors, trying to cut into her belly button where the baby is. This scene is so intense that it always makes me cringe. Sarah wakes up and gets her face cut but manages to barricade herself in the bathroom. Jean-Pierre eventually shows up and the Woman has to do some clever maneuvering of his questions. He asks questions like what does it feel like to be a grandmother? The Woman had lied about being Sarah's mother. At some point Louise shows up and Sarah has grabbed a needle of some kind in the bathroom There is a great suspense build up where when Sarah's mother opens the door she is stabbed in the jugular by Sarah. There are some dark things in this movie, like Sarah killing her own mother that actually can't be elaborated on because the movie just keeps moving. As I have said before, being shot in sequence makes this movie better for the small details. You see Louise's body later and there is a giant pool of blood around it.
While Louise goes up the stairs that is when the Woman kills Jean-Pierre. Eventually the cops show up saying earlier that they would send a patrol car throughout the night. Sarah is still barricaded in the bathroom. Two cops come in and are killed, one with the needle, and one with the gun she takes. Sarah eventually makes a hole in the door and in another scene where you see the devastation of the scissors the Woman stabs her hand to the wall. That is when the cop and the prisoner from the same car come in and she surprises the cop and shoots him with the gun. The criminal is stabbed in the head and it is a haunting moment when his brain is making his limbs move in different ways before he dies. The Woman eventually says that she wants Sarah's baby and that she was the other person in the car accident and she lost her baby. I do like other unanswerable questions this movie has too.
Since this takes place four months after the accident in the beginning you start to think of this from the Woman's perspective a little. She probably stalked Sarah around finding out how far pregnant she may have been, knew the aftermath of the accident with her husband being dead, maybe had a key made to the house or knew some other way to get in. Either way she dedicates herself to getting Sarah's baby. What makes her villainous though is not just that but also everyone else she kills along the way. When other people and cops show up she doesn't have the baby yet so she just figures okay I gotta kill them too. I could see people questioning just how effective she is at it, but you could say the same thing about slasher-killers in any slasher movie. I think the accident must have scrambled her head too because no sane person would do this. Yeah she lost a baby but she can still have one right? She doesn't need Sarah's baby.
I love some of the bloody moments and effects in the second half of this movie too. The blood spray during the kills with the needles is perfect. It never goes into over-the-top Takashi Miike territory. I love the bubbly pouring blood when Sarah gives herself a tracheotomy. That final fight is awesome because Sarah finally steps up. In an ironic twist the Woman's cigarette, something that proves she isn't right for motherhood, is what does her in. Sarah uses an aerosol spray to light her face on fire. I love those FX. I love the zombie looking effects when that one cop comes back and because his brain is scrambled tries to kill Sarah. At that point Sarah only wants to save the baby and has the Woman do a C-section. Something she was going to do the whole time, but Sarah will die. Sarah's water had broke when the cop hit her in the stomach before the Woman came in and killed the cop with an improvised spear of sorts Sarah had made. I always have to turn away from the screen during this moment as they show everything. The movie ends with a dark red color filter and the Woman holding the baby in a chair. I love that color filter because by the end of this movie with all the bloodshed and bleakness nothing feels more right that darkness and redness.
Rating: 10/10 MY SECOND FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME!
Trivia: The address on Sarah's house is 666
No comments:
Post a Comment