Inside

Here Comes
Scissor Claus!

Inside
aka À l'intérieur
France 2007
Directed by
Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury
Second Sight Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: I felt it necessary to have to include all the spoilers lurking inside this movie to make certain points. So please read or decline accordingly. Spoilers from the second sentence on, in fact.

I’d forgotten that Inside was a Christmas movie. Because nothing hammers home those yuletide tidings like a woman scissoring open a mother’s belly to steel her unborn child, obviously. This must be a French concept of a joyous noel, I guess.

It’s been a while since I first saw Inside... it must have been a year or two before I started writing this blog, I suspect. With the release (and subsequent out of print status on this particular edition, although I believe their standard edition is still around) of a new transfer in the UK presented by Second Sight Films, I thought I’d take a look at one of the more genuine and legitimate movies to find itself under the label of the New French Extremity movement. And looking at the movie a second time, I was able to see the tricks the writers/directors used to manipulate the audience, creating more tension and specifically strengthening the slight twist of a reveal at the end.

The film is essentially a two hander (with a fair few human and non-human victims along the way) between main protagonist Sarah, played by Alysson Paradis and the somewhat psychotic La Femme, played by Béatrice Dalle (who of course has par for the course at depicting disturbed individuals, such as her great performance as the title character of Betty Blue aka 37°2 le matin).

The pre-credits sequence of the movie depicts the relevant back story of both characters although, the directors manage to keep the audience blind to the fact that this sequence is about both of them. The way they cement the sleight of hand is with the depiction of a 3D CGI baby in a mothers womb. During the film, as various traumata are visited on Sarah, we occasionally cut to the baby inside her womb reacting to what’s going on. In this opening, the baby is traumatised as the car in which Sarah is on board crashes. She and her unborn child survive but her husband/boyfriend is dead. Now, the thing is, the directors use the way the human brain decodes and reads the visual language of film against the audience. When we see the baby in the womb, it’s looking towards the right hand side of the picture and when we see the car crash, we also see it from the angle that Sarah’s mangled car is on the left, having been driven towards the right. Remember that because I’ll come back to that point later in this review.

Four months later it’s Christmas Eve and it would be true to say that photojournalist Sarah is not particularly coping well to any impending joy of her situation. She goes home on Christmas Eve and the film is set between that evening and the small hours of Christmas Day, the day on which she is supposed to give birth (which she kind of does in the end, just not in the way she thinks). She is alone in the house but not for long, as she is being stalked by La Femme, who wants her to ‘let her inside’. The rest of the film is a violent and gruelling battle between the two and various other people who come between their quite visceral and explicitly gory battle. Sarah’s hand being nailed to a door with scissors is one of the least gory images in the film, for example.

Between the two of them, they manage to dispatch a few victims in the course of their traumatic and traumatising battleground. Sarah inadvertently kills her mother, mistaking her for La Femme, by stabbing her through the neck with a knitting needle and watching her bleed out, ostentatiously painting the upstairs corridor in her blood (although, to be fair, there’s already a lot of blood on the walls and carpets by this point in the film). And as for La Femme... through the course of the movie she manages to kill Sarah’s boss (after scissoring him in the groin she continues to stab in various places with her trusty scissors), Sarah’s cat, three police officers and also the prisoner they had in tow. Plus one final victim, who I’ll get to in a minute, too. One of her victims has had her pair of scissors plunged into his head and she lights a cigarette to watch him bleed out and die... in a kind of shortened scene homage (I would guess), both reminiscent but also the exact opposite in intent of the scene in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly where Clint Eastwood watches the soldier die.

The film is brilliantly shot in a kind of neutral, dreary pastel pallete (presumably to highlight the amount of red viscera in contrast to the colours and lighting) and is somewhat sparsely scored for long sections, the pulsing electronic score kicking in as and when needed (alas, not available on CD still at time of writing). The film weaves a kind of dream state midst the carnage beginning with Sarah’s initial dream sequence of vomiting up milk before giving birth to her child through her mouth and continuing to various gory set pieces. Another neat trick used is to cut out frames and presumably different takes in a scene concentrating on Béatrice Dalle’s face, to underline the unhinged mental state of this character... which is quite effective, it has to be said.

The directors further enhance the way the audience experiences the drama/trauma by giving them hope by having Sarah first perform a tracheostomy on her own throat with a knitting needle to help her breathe again and then by having her fashion a spear with which to go on the offensive with, after already having burned half of La Femme’s face off. It’s all just to rug pull from under the audience again though...

Sarah stays her hand when La Femme reveals her identity to both Sarah and the audience. It turns out the directors’ broke the 180 degree rule of filming somewhat, by having the baby in the opening sequence pointing towards the right. We rewatch the sequence from the point of view of the other car and find that it was a similarly pregnant La Femme who was driving the other car, which we now see from the opposite angle as to the initial version of the car crash in the pre-credits sequence. La Femme lost her child to the accident and now has come to Sarah on the eve of her child’s birth, to cut it from her womb and raise it as her own.  

Then we have the final punchline of the movie... La Femme gets exactly what she wants. We watch as she slowly scissors open Sarah’s belly, her blood and other fluids waterfalling down the stairs they are on and into the hallway, before reaching inside her and pulling the baby from her womb, taking it downstairs and rocking with it in one of Sarah’s rocking chairs... the final image of the movie.

And it’s all brilliant. I liked this one when I saw it years ago but it takes a second watch to realise the brilliance of the directors’ misdirection to keep La Femme’s true identity a secret until the end. Knowing who she is makes certain things in the film make more sense and it all just gels together nicely.  

Inside is one of those masterpieces which slipped under the radar in a lot of countries (as far as I know it’s still banned in Germany) and so I’m glad companies like Second Sight Films are making it more readily available to see in English speaking countries (I think my previous DVD was a US region copy). Their presentation, transfer and extras are great although, much as I admired the visual essay given by a woman relating it to her two Cesarean section births, I think she missed a trick by including in her theory of dual/shared motherhood a drawing on the wall of two pregnant mothers because, if you look at the art they show, it’s quite easily decipherable as a depiction of the faces in profile of Janus the two headed God so, yeah, maybe not. But I would say that this is a nice package to have and it’s an excellent, if somewhat ferocious film. cinephiles would miss this one at their peril, I think. Oh... and don’t go mistaking this for the 2016 Spanish/American remake, which I’m told totally misses the point and sanitises the whole thing down to disappointingly ridiculous levels. Best to avoid that version, I’m told.