Review #248: Inside (2007)

This review was originally written in October 2023.

Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #2 - Inside (2007)

Inside, also known as À l'Intérieur, is a French film about a pregnant woman whose home is invaded by a mysterious woman seemingly intent on killing her to steal her unborn child. While I generally like home invasion films- home invasion is probably one of my deepest-seated fears and encourages a style of filmmaking that I tend to really enjoy- I can't say I was crazy about Inside. I'll get to some specifics in a moment (beware, spoilers ahead) but my general review is that this film has a good vibe and the two main characters put on great performances, and there are some incredibly tense moments in this film, but most of the tension comes from the ancillary characters acting like idiots in order to get themselves killed.

About halfway into the film, some cops arrive at the protagonist Sarah's house while the antagonist is trying to kill her (and by this point, two of Sarah's friends that showed up to help have already been killed). One of the cops ignores his partner's cries of pain one room away while coaxing Sarah out of her hiding spot, allowing the killer to show up out of nowhere to shoot him, and once both of those cops are dead, the third cop outside is alerted by multiple gunshots so he comes inside. He doesn't bother to call in backup first (instead, cuffing himself to an unrelated perpetrator they already had in the car and bringing this hapless kid into an active shooter situation), nor does he bother to call backup when he goes inside and sees FOUR dead bodies (including both of his partners). When he finds Sarah hiding in the bathroom and the killer cuts the power to the building, Cop #3 says he's going to call for backup and an ambulance (again, I don't understand why he didn't do that before entering the building) and then takes the time to bandage Sarah's hands in the dark, find the fusebox, and try to get the power back on, all before going out to call for backup and an ambulance. (And of course, while he spends the ten minutes or whatever doing all of this, the killer shows up and kills him, then kills the hapless kid he brought along too.)

Not only that, but Sarah was given a gun, and she leaves it behind at the first opportunity. Then, after another altercation where she has grievously wounded the killer and caused her to flee, there is a VERY bizarre moment where Sarah takes a sewing needle, stabs herself in the trachea, then wraps duct tape around the wound (?) before going about trying to find and kill her attacker. I have NO idea why she did this, it never comes up for the rest of the film, and seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever. But considering all of the other idiotic things that the characters did in this movie, I'd be lying if I said I expected it to make sense. [Edit from 2024: I've since had someone tell me she was performing an improvised tracheotomy because her throat had been damaged and she was unable to breathe normally, but if that's the case, why did she cover it up with duct tape? Didn't she need that open?]

Like I said, there's a lot of moments of good tension in this film, and it's a kind of horror that I generally tend to like, but this one just fell flat in a lot of ways, largely due to poor writing. It really felt like the writers wanted to keep raising the stakes, but didn't know what to do after that so they just immediately wrote those stakes away and covered it up by making all of the characters idiots.

Overall Rating: 4/10 CGI Babies

Noteworthy Filming Goof: The characters repeatedly reference the fact that the film takes place in the middle of winter, even talking about having to walk through the snow, yet no snow appears in the entire film, none of the characters are wearing coats or have visible breath, and all of the trees are either green or appear to be mid-autumn.