Nemo (Willem Dafoe) is an art thief.
On his latest job, Nemo finds himself sealed inside a hi-tech penthouse apartment.
Without food or water, and with no escape route, Nemo is trapped.
The locked-room thriller is one of my favourite genres - there is something about the limitations of the setting - and the focus it can give to characters in a specific world - which gets me excited.
Inside takes the limitations of the sub-genre to the next level.
What starts out as a heist thriller about a high-end art thief turns into a movie about a contemporary man reduced/stripped to pure survival instinct.
As time passes, he converts the futuristic apartment into a primitive dwelling - where food, water and refuse take precedence.
As his escape attempts become more sophisticated, so do Nemo’s artistic instincts. At first, Nemo's focus is primal - get food and water.
As a survival thriller, it is effective as an urban take on Castaway - Nemo has to improvise solutions to problems, from dealing with the apartment’s blaring alarm, to securing a water supply, to his evolving attempts to escape his prison.
The film is fundamentally about the importance of art to the human condition. No matter how difficult the terrain, we still need art, the power to imagine (and hope) in order to keep going.
Nemo starts drawing on the wall, creating out of despair and hope. As his escape attempt grows in complexity, it begins to resemble a giant art installation of found objects and the unseen owner's art collection.
As the only character on screen, Dafoe is magnificent.
His is a singular presence, hanging somewhere between desperation to overcome, and a berzerk sense of forward momentum.
Because he plays it so earnestly, the film’s ironies work. A more overtly self-aware performance would have exposed the film’s fairly obvious themes.
In Inside, art is not just something to be acquired. It is meant to be studied, used and - perhaps most sacrilegiously - destroyed and remade into new art.
Fascinating.
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