[Film Review] Inside (2007)

A quick search for the most extreme horror will find a collection of debaucherous, filthy, exploitative films – a cornucopia of mean-spirited, ultra-low budget labors of love that have squirmed their way into the hearts of loyal extreme horror fans. 

But high on many of those lists is Inside (2007), a severely underrated gem from the New French Extremity movement that, if audiences were not so righteous in their judgement against blood and gore, would certainly deserve a fair share of praise for its bold, unflinching look at isolation, desperation, and the effects of trauma on the mind and body. 

Inside opens on a fetus floating serenely in the womb, silent but for the sweet voice of the mother as she coos “No one can hurt you now.” This peace is abruptly violated by a crash and the oozing of blood within the baby’s cocoon. The audience is then removed from the womb, floating over the crash and into the car of a shocked and pregnant Sarah (Alysson Paradis) as she sees that her husband has been killed. 

What follows is an extended credit scene that consists of bright blood, viscera and hands as they reach through the inside of body, intestines, and other innards, until they reach the baby as it writhes about. This is a brilliant method of foreshadowing that can easily go unnoticed on the first watch. 

From there the story meets Sarah four months later at an ultrasound the day before she is to be induced which also happens to be the day before Christmas (making this very much a Christmas movie, thank you). She is a dark, withdrawn, shadow of a woman who seems unable to either smile or cry. Her interactions with the doctor and a nurse - who seriously lacks boundaries - show her apparent apathy regarding the upcoming birth of her baby. 

There are moments that reveal the paralyzing pain that Sarah feels over the loss of her husband; early on when she photographs a family at the park and again when she is in her darkroom at home, fantasizing his arms around her belly. She clearly lost a huge piece of her when her husband died, one that won’t easily be filled, even by the baby she carries. 

Inside does an amazing job at presenting a character whose pregnancy doesn’t create happiness. She is broken, scarred, and left doubting her abilities (or desire) to parent alone. One especially effective scene shows Sarah choking on and consequently vomiting up breast milk, her mouth wrenched open like a birth canal, before the baby bursts out of her. This is a dream sequence but is particularly tame compared to the reality that follows. 

Late in the evening, Sarah is startled by a knock on the door and a woman’s voice insisting she let her inside. The woman knows things that she shouldn’t, such as knowing that Sarah’s husband is dead. Sarah advances further into the house where she sees the silhouette of La femme (Béatrice Dalle) outside a glass door. The audience sees her face briefly by the flame of a lighter as she lights a cigarette before smashing her fist against the glass. 

What Inside does so well is to present La femme as almost an apparition. She enters the house, but how? She seems to float in and out of the shadows, making noise but never being heard. And, as is later revealed, the woman is like a ghost – she has suffered trauma that has left her hollowed out and almost unhuman, highlighted so well during scenes of violent and manic rage where La femme can do little else but emit guttural hisses and howls. 

Pregnancy Horror touches a very specific nerve in many viewers, and Inside in particular does what very few films dare; it wields Sarah’s pregnant belly as a weapon against the viewer. At one point La femme watches over Sarah as she sleeps, lifts her shirt over her massive belly, caresses it with an enormous pair of scissors, before pushing into the belly button with a gruesome pop. This is the last real quiet moment of Sarah’s life, and the life within Sarah’s belly, and the audience, who has been trained to believe that pregnant women are off-limits to any real harm, find themselves in a new, terrifying reality.  

Inside is one of the most horrifying, bloody, unrelenting horror films of the past thirty years. It gives the audience a heroine who is forced out of heartbreaking darkness and into the bowels a new sort of hell. La femme is by far one of the most terrifying villains but is also a sad and almost sympathetic character. At one point Sarah threatens to stab her belly, an act that La femme severely punishes, and the audience wonders which of the women has the deeper maternal instinct. 

On an incredible 50-minute behind the scenes documentary, featured on the Dimension Extreme DVD, directing team Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury (Among the Living, Leatherface) describes Inside as a “love story,” and by the end of the film, as the blood flows down the stairs and paints walls, a discerning viewer will see it as such.

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