Review: The Inside

While many feel that found footage as a genre has been wrung dry of any ideas, I think we still see some clever takes on the genre. The Inside feels like something we have seen over and over again with little new ground tred. However, the commitment to creating an icky remnant of several young girls' last moment is commendable.

From the get-go, The Inside excuses its poor camera work by framing the story with a innocuous tale about a man trading something at a pawn shop for a camcorder. On the camcorder is the film that takes up most of The Inside's running time. The film inside the film follows several young women who are celebrating a big birthday. They have lots planned but end up getting trapped by some very unsavory men.

The rest of the film alternates between scenes of rape and yelling and scenes of running and hiding. To say the film lacks any kind of plot isn't fair as this is found footage but the film does lack a sense of direction and momentum. Since we gather early that the women on the tape likely did not survive, seeing the last minutes of their lives turns into an ugly experience. Hope is somewhat key to a horror film experience. If hope if removed, the audience is left to grapple with the idea of being entertained by something kind of gross, a snuff film of sorts. This is a key mistake to why The Inside did not work for me overall but it does work is spats.

Now enough of my griping about the structure of this film. What I am not telling you is that the film is genuinely disturbing at times. Some of the chaos feels a bit too choreographed but the majority of it feels unscripted and sinister. The group of evil men in particular are convincing. There is a long take that is also fairly impressive as a stand-alone scene.

The Inside throws in some supernatural elements towards the end as the man who bought the camcorder begins to investigate what he is seeing. However this feels secondary and ultimately underbaked. The Inside's greatest strength comes in the disturbing footage of these terrified girls. The Inside at times feels natural and authentic, recalling the great Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Ultimately I wanted to like it more than I did but The Inside keeps falling back on dull, familiar tropes of the found footage genre. It has tons of ambition which makes this even more damning. Overall The Inside has enough genuinely disturbing moments and good performances to recommend but it is hard to not feel like the film could have been so much more.

3/5

Amazon: http://amzn.com/B00NT5NR2G

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-inside-2010/id927186199