Inside (2007) sets itself up as a minimalist home invasion film, but body invasion is its most distinctive, essential concern. Its simple, contained scenario—pregnant Sarah (Alysson Paradis), alone at home, faces an intruder (Béatrice Dalle), a woman dead-set on getting inside and assaulting her—serves as a platform for shocking, gory horror maximalism. This excess doesn’t allow Inside to develop the atmosphere of true crime that often accompanies the home invasion movie—the sense that a film is depicting the violent intrusion we worry about when we check the deadbolt before bed. Instead, the setup functions as a maximum-pressure container within which to push the body beyond the limits of the real.
The film launched the collaborative careers of Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, filmmakers with a tonally varied and eclectic horror output who have continued to explore the home invasion genre (Livid, 2011), shocking gore (Leatherface, 2017), and contained, high-stakes scenarios (The Deep House, 2021). Inside’s excess earned it an association with the constellation of extreme and transgressive French films, centered in the aughts, termed the “New French Extremity”—a loose designation, originally tracking a trend in “the high-art environs” of French film, today often applied to extreme horror cinema as well. With Inside, Maury and Bustillo craft a harrowing, unrelenting, adrenaline-overdosing horror film.
Inside does not merely apprehend the vulnerability of its protagonist’s body, a recurring experience in horror, but subjects it to significant and repeated damage from the start. The first shot of Sarah, a prologue, shows her just after a car wreck, face and neck bloodied, blood all over her clothes. She then sustains serious injury in her very first physical encounter with the intruder—“La Femme,” as she’s credited. Yet La Femme isn’t primarily after Sarah’s life, even though she does intend to kill her. She wants the baby Sarah is carrying.
Home invasion cinema draws horror from the vandalization of our safest spaces—the home, the bedroom. Here, the vandalizing energy moves closer: into the body, into the mother’s womb. The camera’s even brought inside—depicting, in violent moments, an unborn baby knocked about in utero. Whatever the boundaries of “New French Extremity” and related filmmaking currents, shocking transgression is a signature, if not fundamental, element of the extreme. The stacked transgressions in Inside—against a pregnant woman, against a baby, against the bodies of both—are transgressions that we’re given little chance to look away from, making the film feel like a paradigmatic work of extreme cinema.
Inside is also a Christmas movie. Maury and Bustillo set their home invasion on Christmas Eve, though they go light on the holiday’s visual markers—the edge of a Christmas tree is visible in a hospital waiting room, Christmas lights twinkle on a neighbor’s home. In the film, Sarah is grieving the loss of her partner, who died four months prior in a car crash; she’s in no mood for Christmas. Even so, Inside manages, like other Christmas movies, to be about family. As the film progresses and the interiors of Sarah’s pleasant two-story home are increasingly covered in blood spray, the holiday associated with family and togetherness becomes the occasion for the final devastation of Sarah’s family. For La Femme, though, the opposite is true. She’s moving toward, in the form of a baby that doesn’t belong to her, a perverse family of her own.
In Dalle’s rendering of La Femme, the smile that spreads on her face as she watches, cigarette in hand, a man she’s scissor-stabbed fall dead in front of her, stands out for its rarity. Though other emotions break through—rage, anguish, an unsettling obsession with both motherhood and Sarah’s body—the character is marked by an icy resoluteness. She sets about her violent task with calm, poise, and a certain vicious relish. La Femme demonstrates a unity of purpose with Maury and Bustillo—unwavering, always willing to do more, to do worse. Inside’s difficulty for an audience arises out of its commitment to sensation—to visceral experience, even when it’s beyond distressing. Its cinema of extreme sensation (an approach that Maury and Bustillo have diverged from in other projects) fits matters close and personal. These are things that can be understood, in a unique way, bodily, through experience. Maury and Bustillo present us with an ordeal, one that insists we feel the fragility of our most intimate world—of the home, of the body, and of the family too.
Inside screens tomorrow, December 10, at Alamo Drafthouse New Mission as part of the series “Terror Tuesday.”
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