Mark Reviews Movies: INSIDE (2023)

Inside, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 16, 2023

Of all the places in which a person could be trapped for an indeterminable amount of time, you could do much worse than a spacious penthouse apartment in New York City. That's what happens to the main and, really, only character in Inside, which functions fairly well as a thriller about survival but clearly has bigger ideas on its mind. Those other ideas never come through in a meaningful or even a tangible way.

Director Vasilis Katsoupis' narrative debut does feature one element that helps to elevate its simple premise. That would be the presence of Willem Dafoe as Nemo, an art thief who invades the quiet luxury of the empty penthouse in the opening minutes of the movie, only to spend the rest of the story trying to find a way out of the place.

Dafoe's that rare breed of actor whose reliability comes from his willingness to take chances, both in his performances and in the material he chooses. This particular role is a fine marriage of that chance-taking quality, because the entirety of the movie depends on his presence, his physicality, and his face.

Apart from some opening and closing narration, the character is a pretty much an empty vessel, into which Dafoe can fill a range of emotions and quirks and a sense of escalating madness. If a whole movie is going to revolve around the notion of watching a person slowly lose his or her mind within a confined space, there's only a short list of known actors who would seem rightly suited to the task of carrying that kind of project.

For his part, Dafoe certainly does that job to an admirable degree, even if his performance is ironically hindered by the fact that he has to most of the heavy lifting of giving this character some quality beyond the situation in which he finds himself. Nemo breaks into the penthouse apartment with the aid of an unseen helicopter and pair of co-conspirators on the other end of a two-way radio. Upon entering the apartment from the balcony, Nemo's mission is to find three particular paintings, worth several million dollars, by a particular artist.

Things mostly go to plan, except that Nemo can't find the most valuable painting. Oh, there's the also the issue that the exit code for the security system given to him by an accomplice turns out to trigger some kind of lockdown measure.

The balcony door seals shut and made of glass thicker than anything in the apartment is capable of breaking. The front door has only a façade of wood, with reinforced steel at its foundation. All of the windows are like the balcony entrance, and a skylight in the center of the room is beyond reach, has a similar kind of glass, and is framed in concrete. There's no easy or seemingly probable way of getting out this place, in other words.

Ben Hopkins screenplay proceeds to throw further complications at Nemo—from the limited amount of food in the apartment, to the fact that owner had the water and gas shut off before a lengthy business trip, to malfunctioning climate-control system that starts pumping hot air into the space non-stop. With only a little understanding of the man (We learn he has had an interest in art since childhood and doesn't particularly care for other people), much of Nemo's character is defined by his actions, and most of his actions point toward someone who's clever, resourceful, and determined. How much of that, though, is the nature of this character, and how much of it is the requirement of having some kind of plot within this inherently restricted narrative?

In a way, such questions don't matter, because the movie is foundationally a thriller about Nemo trying to escape, encountering various obstacles along the way, and finding out how certain solutions only lead to additional or new complications. All of those problems make sense, as Nemo struggles to find any source of water he can and forms an attachment to a cleaning woman named Jasmine (Eliza Stuyck), whom he can only see from the video feed of security cameras on the apartment's television. The solutions to the former are ingenious, if convenient, but the second part begins to offer an idea of how Hopkins and Katsoupis, who's also credited with the idea for the screenplay, fail to expand upon a premise that doesn't necessarily need more.

As he constructs a tower made of furniture in an attempt to reach the skylight for a makeshift demolition project, Nemo also begins to lose an increasing hold on reality, of course. He constructs a sort of shrine to his accomplishments and sources of inspiration within the penthouse, while occasionally dreaming or having visions of the cleaning woman or the apartment's owner (played by Gene Bervoets). The latter moments especially point toward some past relationship with the man, a real or imagined level of stature for Nemo, or the inkling of some grander idea about art and those who find social status around it that barely gets off the ground.

Too much of the later parts of Inside try to attach some deeper notions to Nemo's isolated plight. The movie simply isn't designed or constructed in such a way to examine those ideas, and as a result, it ultimately abandons its promising roots as a well-performed, gimmicky thriller.

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