Nearly three years after the beginning of pandemic lockdowns in North America, Willem Dafoe’s locked inside some rich architect’s penthouse apartment for an indeterminate amount of time, eating his way through the cupboard and battling with the air conditioning, but a spare script has little to say about its tenor or vehicle: “Was that movie a critique of art or in support of it?” Friend asked frowning at the end credits. While we were standing in the hall after the movie, ruining it for anyone who passed by, I listened to everyone catalogue the ways in which they wanted to improve upon Dafoe’s escape instincts, and it filled me with a sense that the film is deeply interested in showing the futility of escape and the ease with which people are set adrift, especially in those peculiar circumstances from three years ago. “Is no man an island or every man?” someone asks Dafoe midway through the film, and Dafoe quibbles, “I’m an island, but ask me after a few drinks.” So much of the imagery of Inside seems like not-so-subtle send ups to the parasocial relationships we developed with pop culture and social media in that first spring of 2020: the mediation of interactions through screens (the Zoom screen is thoughtfully recast as a kind of unbelievable live cam of the public spaces of the building), the perceived scarcity, the rote image at this point of grieving family members mourning the loss of a loved one through thick glass. But Inside goes long on description without much commentary. Dafoe emotes anguish, frustration, and rugged determination, but nothing of his story describes how he got there or where we are now.
There are moments of brilliance: Jasmine’s scene is rapturous, taut eroticism, literally any moment when Dafoe is cooking or foraging.
Inside’s feints at pop philosophy are either muddled satire or just opaque and earnest, and the fact that it’s hard to tell probably reflects poorly on the movie. “There is no part of the soul that is not the body” and “all energy is pure delight” are good codes to live by, especially for a person encountering hardship and isolation, but what they ain’t is practical. Inside is about a year too late to feel immediate and trenchant in its observations of a shared trauma.
Honestly On The Sly 