I just got blown away by this movie. Yes, by conventional film standards, it sucks: almost no story, no narrative arc, almost no dialog for the second half, nothing is ever explained, entirely full of insipid depthless characters who are either brutally loathsome (most of the men) or spend a hell of a lot of time doing nothing but wandering through a darkened building whimpering and screaming (most of the females), spends too much time indulging itself in banal torture porn conventions without going anywhere. I don't even think many of the characters had names. It doesn't even have a trace of the pretentious art-house conventions some films stoop to in order to try to justify the obvious lack of conventional movie-making skill.
And yet, I loved it. I was floored and genuinely scared watching it. I will definitely watch it again.
It's barely a story, it's more just a tapestry of murky, mounting fear, presented for its own sake. In some ways, it's comparable to Fellini in its broad, expositionless, near-abstract presentation of something more wrested from the subconscious than designed to satisfy the intellect.
Its focus on tone rather than narrative is reminiscent of, yes, found-footage origin The Blair Witch Project, but even moreso, of old Giallo horror films, films that reveled in the idea of fear and focused more on creepy mood than the more conventional trappings of movies as "quality" entertainment. No part of the movie is really all that dependent on any other part an any strict way, and it even abandons its "found footage" first-person perspective before it gets to the end. But even so, once it finds makes one of its several shifts and finds its footing about halfway through, abandoning what seems to be a banal brutality-as-spectacle approach and shifting to the stuff of deeper, more phantasmagoric nightmares, it becomes easily the only truly scary film I've seen in a long time. I'm not going to include spoilers, but there are moments in here as iconic and viscerally chilling as Nosferatu's long-fingernailed shadow gliding silently up a stairway wall.
I was genuinely surprised to see "The Inside"'s low 3.3/10 rating on IMDb, but it makes sense. It succeeds in a much less polished, and quieter, but otherwise similarly unconventional way as Lars von Trier's "Antichrist", another film that doesn't even remotely attempt to be enjoyable as a movie-going experience, which, like this film, deceived a lot of people into thinking it was a bad movie instead of quite the opposite.
I almost gave it 9 stars. I still might. This film knows exactly what it wants to be, and it unapologetically is that and only that, to the very core. If you don't like it, the problem may not be with the film, but with you. Despite the rocky beginning, this film's ultimate odd, offputting achievement deserves to be considered a misfit classic.
