À l'intérieur / Inside (2007) Review

Rating 4.5/5

Writer: Alexandre Bustillo

Directors: Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury

Cast: Béatrice Dalle, Alysson Paradis, Nathalie Roussel, François-Régis Marchasson, Jean-Baptiste Tabourin

Known in English as "Inside", "À l'intérieur" is a great little nightmare. I watched a dubbed version which hurt the immersion, but in a way that made the movie easier to watch. There are lots of nasty and disturbing incidents in the movie and when you think things can't get even sicker, they do.

The premise is quite simple. A pregnant women is being stalked by another mysterious woman who seems to be after the unborn baby and she is willing to do anything to get it, and I mean anything. And no, she's planning to wait for a natural birth... The scenes involving the two women are fantastic and truly horrifying. I found myself contemplating to stop the movie at some points, which is very rare for me. It didn't help that I was watching it alone.

While the premise is cool, it's tricky to fill a full length movie with it. The solution the movie-makers went with was getting a bunch of other people get involved in the conflict and get killed violently to bring up the body count. On the one hand these kills were quite well done, but on the other hand it made the movie feel like a generic slasher movie in places and it hurt the atmosphere built in the scenes involving just the two women.

With that said, the movie overall still works. It's full of suspense, action and long moments of disturbing violence. I loved being thrown out of my comfort zone into this insane roller coaster.

Not for everyone, but if you like your horror movies genuinely dark and disturbing this one is an unmissable little gem that runs circles around its Hollywood counterparts. IMDB doesn't list any more movies from the creators, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, which is a shame.

--Mickey