The tried-and-true formula of the home invasion horror focuses on an everyday fear pretty much anyone can relate to. Not even the holly-jolly vibes of the Christmas season can offer the security of locking your front door and believing it will keep you safe. Just recently, Terrifier 3 opened with an unsuspecting family getting a house visit from a demonic Santa impostor, but it’s not the only time a home invasion has decked the halls with gore and terror. The 2007 French slasher À l’intérieur, known by its English title Inside, can make even hardcore horror fans stop and think: why am I watching this? But there are equal parts of shock and awe in watching how it delivers a lean, mean, ultra-violent home invasion set on Christmas Eve. You will never pick up a pair of scissors the same again.
What is ‘Inside’ About?
Sarah (Alysson Paradis) is an expecting mother who decides to spend the holidays by herself, away from friends or family, after a tragedy kills her husband. Her neighbors are away on vacation, and the area is caught up in a wave of violent rioting that keeps everybody on edge. However, her colleague is due to pick her up in the morning so she can be taken to hospital for an induction. All she has to do is wait out the night.
The lonely Christmas Eve is soon interrupted by the Woman (Béatrice Dalle), a stranger who wants to take Sarah’s baby as her own, by any means necessary. It’s considered part of New French Extremity, a film movement that pushed how far movies by French filmmakers could go in presenting controversial violent and/or sexual imagery. Inside more than deserves a spot among other shocking entries from the vicious home invasion Sarah endures.
‘Inside' Unleashes a Frightening Horror Villain
Image via La Fabrique de Films Directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, Inside looks at how deadly humans can be towards each other, much like in other notorious New French Extremity entries. High Tension (2003) follows the intense pursuit between a woman and the murderous truck driver who kidnaps her friend; in Martyrs (2008), a secret society imprisons a woman to torture her and seek out possible answers to the afterlife. Much of Inside's brutality is done by the hands of one individual. As The Woman, Béatrice Dalle doesn’t need to wear a mask like the trio from The Strangers. Inside gives her an ominous presence, while letting the audience know very little about who she is until much later. A knock at the door late at night is already a dread-inducing sound — once the knocker's motivations are established, it becomes all the more terrifying.
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Through the window and the peephole of the front door, Sarah only sees the uninvited visitor as a human-shaped shadow. Being a photographer, she uses the flash of her camera to try and capture The Woman’s face. The ensuing scene is artful and creepy (a staple of New French Extremity) as the strobe light effect on The Woman’s dark shape creates a deep feeling of unease. But when the intruder finally breaks in, The Woman is humanized, exposing not just her face, but the turmoil within her that has turned her into a monster. She could be based on a real-life killer, and that realism never diminishes how frightening The Woman is. The film’s mean-spirited tone that comes with the forced entrance into Sarah’s home slices away at the little hope the expecting mother has to begin with.
'Inside' Delivers a Very Grim Christmas
The intimacy of the one-location setting builds a sense of claustrophobia that never lets up from start to finish. It’s one hell of a debut from its directing pair, where Bustillo and Maury inflict gut-wrenching, relentless pain and death onto characters who either don’t deserve it or don’t see it coming. There are smart yet frustrating ways to allow Sarah to get help, which are whipped away just as quickly as they emerge. Perhaps what is more surprising about the sheer brutality, is what Inside has something to say about the uglier side to grief, and how it can rob someone of their humanity. The Woman and Sarah have both gone through something traumatic with different ways of coping with it, but on this Christmas Eve, they release every ounce of their anguish onto each other.
The injuries and deaths seen in this film are swift, shocking and unrelenting. The action periodically cuts to inside Sarah’s body, to see how her baby is experiencing the life-or-death struggle the mother is put through. When the Woman prepares to cut into Sarah with a pair of scissors, first puncturing her belly button, it’s a sight that will make anyone recoil, and witnessing the baby's reaction makes it all the more uncomfortable. Inside doesn’t reach the same levels of grisly spectacle or yuletide festivities seen more recently with Art the Clown, but it’s hard to deny the bleak and horrifying power of this 2007 French slasher.
Inside is streaming on Tubi.
English (US) ·