The only shocking thing about this slasher is its rating - 7.0?! Obviously, some people are REALLY easy to please/shock.
First off: if the events take place on Christmas (totally irrelevant for the plot, by the way), why is all the foliage GREEN (as in late-summer green)?! And this is not Australia, mind you, this is France. Call me pedantic, but such "oversights" are inexcusable and foreshadow all the bad that is to come.
Secondly: the occasional in utero CGI shots of the baby (besides being completely unnecessary) are so laughably cheap that I can't fathom how come MORE people didn't find them tragically detrimental, especially since more often than not they appear when the "tension" is at its highest and totally destroy it.
Thirdly: comparing this flick to "High Tension" (another French slasher over-hyped by patriots and the easily shocked) might mislead those who've seen it into believing "Inside" has some "psychological" undertones (i.e. that the killer is a projection of the protagonist's alter ego, like in "High Tension"). But it does not. This is as physical as it gets.
A basic rundown of the plot (SPOILERS AHEAD!!!): A pregnant couple has a car crash in which the guy dies. Sometime after, the grief-stricken pregnant widow Sarah gets attacked at her home by a "mysterious" woman, who apparently wants to harm her and/or the baby. Is she real or is she a figment of a conscience burdened by the "survivor's guilt"? Is Sarah symbolically fighting some inner demons? Is she another Rosemary from "Rosemary's Baby"? Nope. Turns out, the attacker is very much real: she was also in that car crash and lost her own baby. And now wants to take Sarah's as her own, killing everyone in her path.
Boo! It's like all interesting movie premises have already been beaten to death and sucked dry, so what you get is one-dimensional, improbable nonsense like this.
What unfolds in between is some of the most unlikely string of events you're ever going to encounter on celluloid, all heftily slopped with buckets of gore. Logical behavior goes out the window, as "plot development" only serves to string two ridiculous gory scenes together, and with it any chance of this movie rising above the slasher level. Now, that may be fine if that's your cup of tea. But "Inside" wants to be so much more.
The problem as I see it is two-fold. Firstly, most people have grown numb to blood and violence. I've spend my childhood in a war zone in Yugoslavia and can blissfully slurp a tomato soup while watching even the most goriest scenes around. Others have grown numb through news, internet and an overabundance of movie violence. Now, that may be unfortunate psychologically speaking, but for aspiring horror directors it means they must try harder to scare and scar us than by drowning their flicks in self-serving, senseless gore.
Secondly, even those faint of heart will grown numb if you beat them over the head with non-stop pointless violence. It gets to a point where it starts being comical. Like in the last "Rambo".
Back to the plot. If your viewer is perplexed by the illogical behavior of your characters and is constantly going "Why?", how do you expect him to be shocked? For instance, Sarah never attempts to escape through the bathroom window (or any other windows, for that matter). The woman (a regular citizen up until then) manages to outmaneuver and kill three (THREE!) armed police officers, because police is, naturally, incompetent. When Sarah comes in the room looking for a weapon to defend herself, instead of any of THEIR weapons (including a grenade launcher), she goes for a POKER! Logic? Anyone? And then, later on, possibly exhausted by all the gore, she goes to bed mid-action and falls asleep like a baby, only (of course) to be attacked by the ever-awake killer woman. She even manages to inadvertently kill her own visiting mother, mistaking her for the killer: an implausible event which serves no other purpose then to give us a nice shot of a squirting jugular and up the ante on the "sickness" with some unnecessary matricide.
To a similar end, you also get a scene in which one of the officers (previously shot pointblank in the head) magically resurrects and proceeds to beat SARAH (not the killer woman, mind you) with a truncheon across her pregnant belly (why? WHY?!), causing Sarah to spurt buckets of blood from her vagina. Sick? Would have been, if the scene made ANY sense at all. And if it wasn't interspersed with yet another laughable shot of the pathetically computer-rendered baby inside her.
And the score? Sudden, loud, cacophonous sounds during "scary" scenes. Yaaawwwn.
I could go on and on about all that is wrong about this movie, but anyone still reading this has already wasted enough time on it, so do yourself a favor and don't go watch it too (a benevolent advice that far too often goes ignored around here - myself being guilty as charged too).
A shallow, illogical mess of a movie for the faintest of heart and undemanding. Pulls nothing but cheap gory punches. Go revisit "Rosemary's Baby" for the 100th time if necessary.
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