INSIDE

INSIDE is an intense drama about an art thief in New York City who gets trapped in the fancy, well-secured apartment of an art collector who won’t be home for a couple months. INSIDE has some interesting, powerful moments, with a noteworthy performance by Willem Dafoe and a redemptive worldview that contains positive allusions to Heaven, but there are many “f” words, two gross moments involving eating and digestion, images of a nude painting, and neither God nor Jesus are mentioned in a positive context.

The movie opens with Dafoe’s character, code-named Nemo, conversing on a walkie-talkie with two men while he steals some paintings from an art collector’s fancy apartment in New York. To their chagrin, a $3 million portrait they expected doesn’t appear to be in the apartment. Nemo frantically searches for it, but the alarm suddenly malfunctions and lets off a baring sound. Nemo tries to find a way to fix the alarm, but he can’t figure it out and the alarm just suddenly shuts off. Now, however Nemo is trapped in the well-secured apartment, and his two cohorts on the walkie-talkie are long gone.

Nemo tries multiple ways to free himself. For example, he tries chopping up the heavy wooden door in front, but the fancy wood just hides the steel inside.

Of course, there’s not much food in the refrigerator or the pantry, and the water’s been shut off. There is, however, a little tree garden in the center of the living room with a sprinkler system, and two big fish tanks with tropical fish swimming around in them.

A big problem presents itself. The broken alarm also controls the apartment’s heating and cooling system, and the temperature starts passing 100 degrees with the heat turned on full blast.

INSIDE has some interesting, powerful moments with a noteworthy performance by Willem Dafoe as the art thief. During his rummage about the house, he finds an old mysterious book about Heaven and Hell. The discovery of the book inspires the art thief to sing about going to Heaven. Also, the paintings in the apartment inspire him to create his own art works in charcoal on the wall. Thus, despite the protagonist’s desperate situation, the movie implies that he finds a kind of redemption by his thoughts about Heaven and Art.

However, the movie has no positive references to God, Jesus or the Bible. So, the movie’s seemingly positive worldview remains undeveloped and cryptic. INSIDE is also marred by many “f” words, images of a nude female painting on a wall, and brief gross moments involving the art thief’s eating of the aquarium fish and his digestion. So, MOVIEGUIDE® advises extreme caution.