Merry Christmas from the To Watch Pile! For the silly season, here’s a special Christmas movie as a gift, sourced from the re watch pile…

Inside aka À L’Interieur (2007)

Film: ‘Taste’ is a funny thing. There are things in life that one feels that they should love but for some reason, don’t. I love chocolate, and I love chilli, but chilli chocolate I just can’t do.

In the realm of TV, everyone who watched Game of Thrones told me I would love it due to it containing elements of other things I love: a fantasy medieval period, violence, blood ‘n’ guts, dragons and boobs, but to date I haven’t been able to get past the second episode. Yes, I am aware that by the sixth episode I’ll be hooked, but I’m sorry, if someone told me that a film gets good ‘at the sixth hour’, I probably wouldn’t waste my time with it. Sure it’s acted beautifully but I just don’t get the obsession over it.

Now a few years ago, French cinema made a few films that took the world by store, and me along with it. The filmic cheat of ‘Haute Tension’, the mind blowing ‘Martyrs’ and the nuevo-Nazploitation of Frontier(s) all kicked me in the balls, but there were two films that everyone on the planet rubbed their rhubarbs over that just didn’t click with me: ‘Ils’ aka ‘Them’ and this film ‘Inside’ aka ‘Á L’interieur’.

Inside tells of a pregnant woman, Sarah (Allysson Paradis) whose husband dies in a car accident, and several months later, on Christmas Eve, and the night before she is to go into hospital to have the baby, a stranger (Béatrice Dalle) knocks at her door wishing to come in and use the phone as her car has broken down. Sarah, feeling vulnerable, tells her that she can’t let her in as her husband is sleeping.

To which she tells her that she knows her husband is dead.

The next several harrowing hours (in film time, not actual time) are spent with this strange woman trying, and succeeding in gaining access to the house, but what does she was from the inside the ‘house’ and what are her motives for trying to get ‘inside’…

My main issue with this film is the protagonist. I am certainly one with whom a movie does not sit well if the final girl or guy is unpleasant, and this is so very true here. Sarah is such an unpleasant human being that I don’t care about her, in actual fact on several occasions I was praying that Dalle would just execute her and be done with it. 

I get that the French films of this period were trying to show a more ‘real’ and gritty cinema at the time this was made, and honestly, home invasion films scare me more than any other kind, but this just did not strike the right chord with me.

Don’t get me wrong, the violence and gore of this film is tiptop and shocking, and, if you’ll excuse the pun, executed brilliantly, and I winced more than once. If Chas. Balun were still alive (we miss you, Chas.) I am sure this film would have rated quite highly in the ‘gore’ section of his ‘Gore Score’, but without that sympathetic lead, I just don’t care.

Also, it’s made really well too and there is a real feeling if claustrophobia to the whole film, and I’ll even give credit to the idea of a pregnant woman being terrorised should have worked and the whole script is pretty good, though their are a few police procedures that even the cops from The Last House on the Left and Human Centipede would raise an eyebrow at.

So yes, I don’t think it’s a total abortion but not being able sympathise with the main character makes it difficult for me to like. For me, if I want to watch a home invasion film set at Christmas, I’ll probably watch Home Alone again instead of this.

Score: **

Format: This region 1, American release DVD runs for approximately 82 minutes and is presented in a nice 1.78:1 video with a great pair of audio tracks, one in English 5.1 and one in French 5.1, both which are top shelf. There are, of course, subtitles available.

Score: ****

Extras: The disc opens with several trailers: Diary of the Dead, Storm Warning and The Mist, and the extras menu has one for Inside as well.

The core part of this extra package though is a pretty amazing, almost one hour long making of the film. It isn’t divided into 10 mini-featurettes like most of these things are: it’s a solid look at the making of a film. I will warn that it is in French, so you can’t put it on and do something else… you know, like write a review for a blog.

Score: ***

WISIA: I’m not a fan, so probably not.