Movie Review: Inside aka À L’Intérieur (2007)
Movie Review: Inside aka À L’Intérieur (2007)
Okay, I finally watched the original New French Extremity version of Inside (À L’Intérieur). I’ve seen the tame but still creepy (home invasion is still creepy even if tamed down) American version, but had to get up the nerve to watch the original. Why? Because fetal abduction involves C-sections with tools at hands, and New French Extremity is gnarly. Shudder has added nearly all the NFE films, so I went for it. Here’s my review:
4 stars (out of 5), March 1, 2022
The last word in the movie is Sarah crying out for her “Mommy!”
That last shot is some brutal, fairy-tale stuff.
This movie would have been better had the fetal reactions been left out. I’ve afraid if I were high I would have thought them funny. They yanked me out of the fear and action.
Fetal abduction: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6990419.stm
This movie has a punch at the beginning, then slows down, dealing with grief at Christmas. Then when the next punch comes, it doesn’t stop. And like all the New French Extremity films, the gore and body integrity (aka body horror) is in your face. NFE is not for everyone, by a long shot.
Warning: do not read the plot section of the Wikipedia page; it is replete with spoilers, right down to giving away the ending of the movie.
Alysson Paradis, the actress playing the pregnant woman and homeowner, is the younger sister of Vanessa Paradis. You may know her as the mother of Johnny Depp’s child; I am strange, so I know her as the pop singer known for “Joe le taxi”. Beep beep.
Then there is Béatrice Dalle, who played the incredibly disturbing invader. Wikipedia can be scary. Warning: Really disturbing, possibly offensive real-world content in this paragraph. “Interviewed on the French TV programme Divan in 2016, Dalle stated that when she used to work in a morgue with her friends, they sold body parts of corpses, and while on acid, they ate a dead man’s ear.” I had to quote this verbatim, with all links, because. Because. Source: The Independent. And there’s more, from The Guardian: “I love Christ because he invented bondage.” What the absolute what.
I knew she gave me a different vibe.
Most people in the horror genre are wonderful people. Here’s your proof and your palate cleanser: Scares That Care.
If you are interested in the (relatively rare) true crime phenomenon of fetal abduction, in which people steal pre-born infants (yes, really) and pass them off as their own children, an excellent book on a case is Murder in the Heartland by M. William Phelps. Also check out the BBC link in my review.
Inside (2007) directed by Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury
Inside (2016) directed by Miguel Ángel Vivas
The post Movie Review: Inside aka À L’Intérieur (2007) first appeared on There Might Be Cupcakes Podcast.