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“ Inside ” has an initial premise that's so intriguing you can imagine any number of gifted filmmakers making an absolute meal out of it. The problem is that Vasilis Katsoupis , the film’s director, is evidently not one of them. The result is a movie that never comes together into a satisfying whole, and which will leave most viewers afterward feeling as hungry for something of actual substance as the hapless protagonist whose misadventures they have just spent the previous 105 minutes watching.

That protagonist is Nemo ( Willem Dafoe ), an art thief. As the story begins, he has just been dropped off at a massive New York penthouse apartment by unseen handlers. After disabling the security alarm, Nemo quickly grabs nearly all of the Egon Schiele paintings he's there to take, but just as he is about to depart, the security system malfunctions and locks everything down. The handler tells Nemo he's on his own and then disappears. After trying and failing to break a window and cut through the ornate front door, Nemo finally realizes he is stuck.

That is bad, but as he soon discovers, things will get much worse. Although the apartment is filled with priceless works of art (the end credits list them like other films do with the songs on the soundtrack) and bric-a-brac, there's little in the place that suggests human beings actually reside there. The fridge is virtually empty (though it does helpfully play “Macarena” whenever the freezer is open, the plumbing is shut down, and the only sources of water are a pool, the automatic watering system for the indoor garden, and a couple of large fish tanks (and you can probably guess the fate of the fish that they contain). If that weren’t enough, the fritzing control system causes the temperature to vary, seemingly at random, between broiling highs and freezing lows.

Nemo realizes that he's in for the long haul. But that does not stop his determination to escape, primarily by jerry-rigging the apartment’s furnishings into a tower that he ascends in hopes of busting through the skylight high above. In between those intense and occasionally painful efforts, as the days seemingly blend into weeks, he staves off the pains of isolation by entertaining himself. He stages fake cooking shows (demonstrating how to make pasta without a working stove) and makes up stories involving the other building denizens he can see via security camera but who have no idea he is there. The effect is like what Matt Damon went through in “ The Martian ”—the difference being that it all takes place in a setting worth enough money to potentially fund a good part of a Mars mission all by itself.

Back to what I was saying about other filmmakers potentially making something out of the setup that Katsoupis and screenwriter Ben Hopkins have devised here. While watching "Inside" and finding it to not work, I found myself thinking of three distinctly different directors who could have done wonders with the material. For example, I can see Jerry Lewis transforming it into a potentially brilliant piece of sustained solo slapstick as he reduces the place to shambles while struggling to get free. (If you doubt this, check out the astonishing opening sequence to his final directorial effort, “Cracking Up,” in which he inadvertently destroys his psychiatrist’s waiting room through klutzy moves, a waxed floor, and a bag of M&M’s.) On the other hand, I can also see the story as a sort of existential arthouse (no pun intended) horror film from the likes of Michael Haneke —sort of what might result if he was inexplicably hired to direct the third “ Escape Room ” film. Finally, I would have loved to see this concept in the hands of the late great Larry Cohen , who was famous for films with audacious premises like this and could have properly navigated the moves into sociological commentary about the value, literal and metaphorical, of art.

Your mileage may vary regarding the filmmakers I have cited, but whatever you might say about them, they all bring particular points of view to their work that makes them distinct and intriguing. Katsoupis, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have anything of interest to say about his basic narrative or its subtext concerning the values people place on art. As a result, "Inside" becomes little more than an exercise in cruelty as we watch Nemo struggle to escape his apparent fate, and while some of the individual moments are darkly funny, they don’t really add up to much. It all concludes in a manner that I think is meant to be slightly symbolic (I kid— Ruben Östlund himself might find it too on the nose), but which is likely to leave most viewers feeling seriously underwhelmed.

Oddly enough, one of the best things about “Inside” is also one reason it doesn’t quite work, and that's Dafoe's performance. Don’t get me wrong—in what is essentially a one-man show, he's riveting as he navigates Nemo’s inner journey from despair to resignation to some kind of grace with a roller coaster's intensity. But this is the kind of wild, let-it-all-hang-out work we know going in that Dafoe is capable of pulling off, and as a result, his descent into savagery has a whiff of the familiar to it. It might have been more effective to cast a more famously laid-back actor and put them through the wringer found here. Cast someone like George Clooney in the role of Nemo, set it up like another slick “Ocean’s Eleven”-style romp, and then have him resort to licking the inside of an empty freezer for sustenance.

“Inside” is made with some evident degree of skill and craft (the apartment is a wonder of production design), but they're in service of a story nowhere near as profound or audacious as it believes itself to be. The film has its moments, and Dafoe certainly gives it his all, but there's a hollowness that ends up rendering the whole thing fairly forgettable—the cinematic equivalent of a piece of art you buy only because it goes well with the couch.

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Peter Sobczynski

A moderately insightful critic, full-on Swiftie and all-around  bon vivant , Peter Sobczynski, in addition to his work at this site, is also a contributor to The Spool and can be heard weekly discussing new Blu-Ray releases on the Movie Madness podcast on the Now Playing network.

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Film credits.

Inside (2023)

Rated R for language, some sexual content and nude images.

105 minutes

Willem Dafoe as Nemo

Gene Bervoets as Owner

Josia Krug as Jack

Eliza Stuyck as Jasmine

• Vasilis Katsoupis

Writer (based on an idea by)

• Ben Hopkins

Cinematographer

• Steve Annis
• Lambis Haralambidis
• Frederik van de Moortel

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‘inside’ review: willem dafoe adds another tortured soul to his portrait gallery in a suffocating intellectual exercise.

Greek director Vasilis Katsoupis’ first dramatic feature is a high-concept thriller about a master art thief trapped in a luxury New York penthouse that turns on him.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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But Inside might represent a new extreme, trapping the actor alone onscreen for the duration — aside from one or two brief dream detours — to wrestle with the technology of a mutinous luxury smart home and, most of all, with himself. That will make this March release from Focus a tough sell, especially since it feels less like a story than an agonized fever dream, or one of those endurance art installations, like Tilda Swinton snoozing in a glass box at MoMA.

Dafoe plays an art thief named Nemo who breaks into the sprawling Manhattan penthouse of an unidentified one-percenter with the specific task of removing some prized portraits by Egon Schiele, valued at a cool $3 million. But before he can slip away, the security system malfunctions and he’s stuck there, abandoned by his accomplice on the outside. Turns out the apartment is designed to make escape just as difficult as forced entry.

In voiceover at the start of the film, Nemo recalls being asked as a child which three things would he save if his house was on fire. While his classmates at school dutifully listed family members, he boiled it down to an AC/DC CD, his cat and his sketchbooks. On subsequent reflection he discovered, “Cats die, music fades, but art is for keeps.”

That’s a pretty bleak summation to leave an audience with after almost two hours of grueling imprisonment set to a brooding ambient score. But Katsoupis and his screenwriter Ben Hopkins are not interested in rewarding our patience with revelations any more than they are in providing an unambiguous ending. This is a movie that aims to ponder big questions of physical and spiritual survival, of the resilience of the soul, the primacy of energy as it’s steadily drained from the protagonist.

Inside is also, it has to be said, a bit of a masturbatory exercise, of the type that’s irresistible to a brainy actor’s actor like Dafoe. The full-tilt commitment of his performance as Nemo spirals into madness is aided by the imagination of Katsoupis and Hopkins, continually throwing new challenges at him as his confinement stretches on and it becomes clear that no one is coming to liberate or arrest him.

That includes the same kind of elemental hardships that beset the characters in outdoor survival stories as the water is shut off and the air-conditioning system goes haywire, cranking the temperature up over 100 degrees and then down to a teeth-chattering chill. And just as Tom Hanks had the volleyball Wilson for company in Cast Away , Nemo has a wounded pigeon grounded on the terrace just beyond the unbreakable glass doors.

But the movie’s high concept becomes steadily more limiting — eventually almost as exhausting for the audience as it is for Nemo. His imagined interactions with the building concierge, residents or especially a cleaner that he observes daily on the closed-circuit monitors do little to shake up the static nature of the thrill-deprived thriller.

Nor do his fantasy interludes or his windy pontifications about visual art, sparked by the striking collection of contemporary work on display throughout the penthouse, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi. Ultimately, those art pieces seem to both mirror and mock Nemo’s psychological deterioration, just as the smart home technology has been doing.

Production designer Thorsten Sabel’s apartment is a visual knockout, a deluxe serve of Architectural Digest porn that dazzles with its opulent austerity and then visibly hardens into a cold, unaccommodating citadel of capitalist privilege, in which the intruder must pay with his sanity.

The director’s work can’t be faulted for its rigorousness, and as a tightly packaged COVID construct, this is more inventive than most. But even the formidable Dafoe at his most intense ultimately can’t stop Inside from succumbing to its own narrowness, devolving into a self-reflexive portrait of soul-sucking isolation.

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‘Inside’ Review: Tortured Artist, Meet Tortured Man

Willem Dafoe stars as an art thief who gets trapped in a penthouse in this drama.

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By Amy Nicholson

The art thief (a brutish Willem Dafoe) trapped in a megamillionaire’s extravagant loft knows the value of the bronze wedge he’s damaging in a desperate attempt to pry open the door. It’s one of the few pieces he intended to steal from the smart home before its security pad failed and the exits locked shut. But Vasilis Katsoupis, the director of the stark survival thriller “Inside,” deliberately withholds that the makeshift crowbar is meant to be the Lynn Chadwick piece “Paper Hat,” last auctioned at 2.5 million pounds. Katsoupis prefers his moral challenge incalculable: Do we want the art to endure or the criminal?

Playing fair, the filmmaker also refuses to share details about the burglar. Blessedly, there are no flashbacks to the robber’s mother, no panic about a spouse or cat, and not much voice-over aside from a couple of lines establishing that the man once fancied himself an artist, too. I wouldn’t have known his name was Nemo if not for the end credits — good thing, as I’d have giggled when he made sashimi of the tropical fish.

The logic behind Nemo’s captivity doesn’t gel. (Alarm sirens screech with not one visit from the security desk? Who do they summon, Batman?) Katsoupis and the screenwriter Ben Hopkins aren't concerned with making a credible heist caper. Katsoupis is more of a snotty provocateur with the elegance to posture as deep. He sneers at the rich, stocking the stony apartment with futile luxuries that give it the feel of a pharaoh’s tomb. The fridge contains only caviar, truffle sauce and booze; worse, it blares the “Macarena” to remind users to shut the door. (There are just three musicians on the film’s soundtrack — John Cage, Radiohead, and those forbidden dancers Los Del Rio — the cinematic equivalent of a challenge on “Chopped.”) At the same time, the fritzing control system cuts the water and cranks the heat to 106 degrees. So-called smart tech — the practical opposite of fine art — is the closest thing to a villain. This computer isn’t self-aware like Hal 9000. Still, Stanley Kubrick would say he warned us not to hand our house keys to Siri.

The contemporary art curator Leonardo Bigazzi shrewdly selected the work that lines the walls. A photo of a duct-taped man mocks the prisoner’s plight. Overpriced neon tubes are there so we can look forward to seeing them smashed. Our knee-jerk guesstimations of worth are continually pranked. Take when a starving Nemo finds a few oranges. They’re moldy. (Worthless.) Wait, they’re concrete sculptures. ( Insultingly worthless!) Nemo hurls the concrete at the windows. (Oh! Maybe they’re useful after all?) A hungry man can’t care that the oranges’ sculptor, Alvaro Urbano , intended to comment on cultural rot during the Franco dictatorship.

So it’s disruptive, and then cathartic, to watch Dafoe’s primal performance dominate this museum/mausoleum and force us to side with humanity. He’s perfectly cast in a part that calls for quietly whirring intelligence. Plus, he’s the rare movie star with the kind of brutal bone structure that would have inspired the Expressionist painter Egon Schiele — who has several pieces here — to grab his paintbrush. (The unpleasant close-up of Nemo’s bowel movements in the bathtub, however, only works as a nod to Andres Serrano.)

The film abandons its tempo somewhere after the eighth sunset, when the days begin to blend together and Katsoupis slathers on unnecessary hallucinations. When boredom sets in, we’re offered the silence to contemplate our own definition of art as Nemo the criminal evolves into Nemo the creator. His towering escape contraptions are tools. His haunting wall doodles are therapy. They’re both awarded as much reverence as everything with a price tag.

Inside Rated R for nude and crude imagery. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.

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• Review: Willem Dafoe Is an Art Thief Confronting a Long Night of the Soul in <i>Inside</i>

Review: Willem Dafoe Is an Art Thief Confronting a Long Night of the Soul in Inside

I t’s a wonder we didn’t all go mad. How did we even survive the early days of the pandemic, a seemingly interminable epoch during which many of us spent long hours holed up in our sad little towers, captives in sweatpants gazing longingly at the outside world? Vasilis Katsoupis’ intriguingly odd little psychological thriller Inside isn’t a pandemic parable per se, but it’s likely to resurrect some jittery memories of those days even so. A high-end art thief played by Willem Dafoe botches a burglary and finds himself trapped alone in an art-filled luxury penthouse, for hours that stretch into days. Will he get out, and if so, how? Meanwhile, what is all that time spent alone—not to mention all that art, which includes an elegantly haunting Egon Schiele self-portrait—doing to his brain?

There’s a lot going on in this captivating, buzzingly cerebral picture. Written by Ben Hopkins, from an idea by Katsoupis, Inside is partly a black comedy about enforced solitude. But it’s also about the ways art can sustain us even as it may incite feelings we’d rather not deal with, and it tangles with the messy process of creating art in the first place: for some, that creation is a compulsion, almost a prison break of the mind, a way to make sense of the entropy of the human psyche.

Inside is essentially a one-man extravaganza for Dafoe, and he shoulders its complexities ably, with zero vanity. At the film’s beginning, Dafoe’s Nemo is a confident heist-master, disabling alarm systems with ease and freeing priceless pictures from the wall with a magician’s deftness. The penthouse’s zillionaire owner is in Kazakhstan for an unknown length of time, and he’s set up complex technology to babysit his possessions while he’s gone. None of this circuitry intimidates Nemo; he’s studied it like a master.

Until it all goes haywire, and Nemo finds himself locked inside a luxury pad turned sinister. The temperature controls zig and zag with a mind of their own, leaving him sweating one minute and shivering the next. There’s no running water. To amuse himself, Nemo contemplates the paintings and sculptures around him. (They include works from artists like Francesco Clemente, some specially commissioned for the film.) Before long, his response to his confinement becomes a work of art itself, one whose creation drives him into a semiferal state. Dafoe is alive to every shift: When he strips down, his bony shoulders have a temple-like austerity. When he sweats, every pore seems alert. Some of these descent-into-madness transitions may not be easy to watch, but they’re never, ever boring.

Inside is magnetic precisely because it doesn’t hand over easy answers. It can feel arty and arch, a bit taken with its own somber cleverness. And then Katsoupis pulls off a hilarious little curlicue, like an interlude in which Nemo performs a cooking-show routine for an audience of no one. His meal of choice is pasta selected from the apartment’s ever waning pantry staples, soaked overnight in cold water. He goes through the preparation steps, all two of them, with the affability of Ina Garten.

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Even that little bit of pasta water is a precious commodity: it comes from a timed sprinkler that’s been set up to hydrate one of the apartment’s key features, a small, lush indoor forest. Nemo waits and waits to hear the hiss of that sprinkler, and when it finally comes, he flops down in this mini Eden and cackles with joy amid the glittering spray. It’s a moment of heaven in a peculiar kind of hell. Leave it to Dafoe to make the most of every drop.

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The Thief as Artist in “Inside”

By Anthony Lane

The hero of “Inside,” a new film directed by Vasilis Katsoupis, is apparently called Nemo, though I never caught the name. All I know is that he’s a thief, and that he’s played by Willem Dafoe . As the story commences, a helicopter deposits Nemo onto the roof of a tall building in New York. From the fact that the chopper is heard but not seen, you will gather that “Inside” is not blessed with an inexhaustible budget. Here is an art-house flick, cunningly coated in the gleam of a high-tech thriller.

And what an art house. Nemo breaks into a top-floor apartment, which looks more like a gallery than a home. It belongs to a man of evident wealth and slightly uncertain taste, who is away in Kazakhstan. Hanging on the walls—or, in the case of video installations, projected onto screens—are multiple works of modern art, mostly of recent vintage. The oldest are by Egon Schiele , and it is these that Nemo has come to steal, presumably so that they can be passed on to another Croesus. Swift and feline, Nemo gathers all but one of the Schieles and prepares to depart, whereupon the security system locks the doors and shuts him in. He must spend the rest of the film alone, aloft, unmissed, and unlamented. Think Rapunzel without the hair.

It’s not hard to spot the wily ways in which Katsoupis and his screenwriter, Ben Hopkins, rig the plot. The gas and the water have been switched off in the apartment, meaning that Nemo can’t cook any food or flush the toilet. The electricity, on the other hand, remains on, so he is able to admire a glowing blue neon sign—another piece of art—that reads “all the time that will come after this moment.” The fridge, too, is in use: there’s an amazing shot of Nemo, parched and desperate, inserting his head into the icebox and licking the chilly moisture from the sides. Oh, and the phone that connects him to the lobby of the building is out of order. Of course it is.

All of which suggests that “Inside” belongs with “ Castaway ” (2000), “The Martian” (2015), and other tales of solitary survival. Although Nemo is in the lap of luxury, snacking on truffle sauce and caviar from the fridge, the apartment is as imprisoning as Mars, and, being a resourceful fellow, he is determined to abscond. The only possible exit is a skylight, and the only means of reaching it is to build a tower from a bedstead and other bits of furniture. Standing atop his structure and chipping away at plaster, he needs something to protect his eyes, so he smashes a purple glass vase, picks out two curved shards, and binds them together with fabric. Voilà: a pair of makeshift goggles. The look is part handyman, part demon. Very cool, and very Dafoe.

What distinguishes Nemo from earlier Crusoes is that he’s not just an escape artist but an actual artist. In voice-over, he tells us that, as a child, he valued his sketchbooks above all else; now, in his compulsory lockdown, he begins to draw. Graphite sprinkles onto the floor, so he scoops it up, swishes it around his mouth, and spits on the wall, making a black splash—oral Action painting, you might say. Also, as if his tower had not sated his yen for construction, he conjures a sculpture of found materials: a form of altar, crowned with soft cushions and metal nuts. But who is worshipping whom? What’s going on?

Well, the movie is morphing. Much of it, in the first half, is funny, deft, and dotted with suspense. If the door of the fridge is left open, for example, the Macarena starts to play. (Nemo, initially vexed by this, gives in and dances along.) A young woman (Eliza Stuyck) employed as a cleaner in the building is oblivious of Nemo’s presence, yet he can observe her on CCTV. He names her Jasmine, and, at one lovely point, he watches her enjoying a quick cigarette and vacuuming the smoke from the air. Gradually, however, “Inside” grows heavy. The tread of the story slows; dream sequences intrude, to no effect; Nemo turns inward, courting madness; and we realize that Katsoupis is positioning his film as an exercise in performance art, to match the video installations and the other works. Notice the photograph of a man attached to a wall with duct tape. That is an untitled image by the waggish Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan , from 1999, and the poor guy being displayed, with a heretical hint of crucifixion, is a gallery owner from Milan—a kindred spirit for Nemo, who is equally stuck.

To a degree, this creative scheme makes sense. It certainly tallies with the singular career of Dafoe, whom we saw as the thieving Caravaggio, an Allied agent with missing thumbs, in “The English Patient” (1996); as van Gogh, in “At Eternity’s Gate” (2018); and, long ago, in “To Live and Die in L.A.” (1985), as a snaky villain and artist who sets fire to one of his own paintings, the better to concentrate on his skills as a master forger. The face is more graven these days, but the gnashing grin and the wry tone of his delivery are unchanged, as is Dafoe’s knack for wrong-footing us; his wicked characters are as hard to dislike as his virtuous ones are to trust. We instinctively believe in him as a maker of things, and “Inside” would have been implausible, or unbearable, with any other actor in the role. Life, in the hands of Dafoe, is an agonized game.

For Katsoupis, regrettably, agony wins the day. To furnish a movie with cultural props, however lavish, is not to confer an automatic gravity and heft; witness Nemo inching into a hidden passageway and discovering not just a Schiele self-portrait, from 1910, but an original copy of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” by William Blake, which Nemo then studies and recites. (The Blake is quite a coup, since only nine copies are known to exist.) Do the shenanigans of “Inside” keep honest company with such treasures? Should we bracket Dafoe, compellingly wiry as he is, with the acutely angled stiffness of the Schiele picture—the “enigmatic substances I am made of,” as the artist wrote in 1911? Not really. Give me the sharp wit of the movie’s early scenes, which are far more disrespectful: the enigma-free sight of Nemo, for instance, trying to crunch through a door and deploying “Paper Hat,” a bronze sculpture by Lynn Chadwick, as a crowbar . Who said art is no use?

Two ways to win the Cold War. Option one: a first strike, annihilating the Communist bloc’s arsenal of nuclear weapons before they can be launched in retaliation. Option two, no less fraught with risk: send nine white guys, including four horn players and a singer with a penchant for leather pants, to perform Grammy-winning rock and roll behind the Iron Curtain. It is this second course of action that was pursued in 1970, and that is investigated in a knotty new documentary, “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?”

Nobody would have asked that question in 1969, when “Blood, Sweat & Tears,” the second album by the group of the same name, was enthroned for weeks at the top of the charts. It’s a witches’ brew, kicking off with a riff on Erik Satie and marked by salvos of brass and mid-song shifts in tempo, but the director of the documentary, John Scheinfeld, doesn’t dive very deep into the music. Although he has made films about John Coltrane, John Lennon, and Harry Nilsson, what grips him here, understandably, is the particular summer when Blood, Sweat & Tears went on tour to Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland. It was a revelation, and a fall from grace.

Why did they go? Blackmail, of a sort. The lead vocalist, a Canadian named David Clayton-Thomas, had a voice of tremendous rasp and rumble. He sounded like a volcano making conversation. He was also in danger of losing his green card, and, to avoid that fate, the band’s manager struck a dark deal with the U.S. State Department, which wanted American performers who could spread the word, or the groove, behind enemy lines. So the band was dispatched to hot spots such as Zagreb (where the audience was sullenly unresponsive) and Warsaw (the opposite). Scariest of all was Bucharest, where the concert was officially deemed “too successful,” where cops with German shepherds were on hand to quash the crowd’s delight, where one enthusiast was taken away and beaten for requesting an autograph, and where “people don’t enjoy the privilege of spontaneous outburst,” as Clayton-Thomas reported, back in L.A. He added, “It’s given us all a new appreciation of various freedoms that we took for granted.”

That was true, but it was an unforgivable truth—anathema to those in the counterculture for whom America held a monopoly on repression. Blood, Sweat & Tears were reviled in the press as a “fascist rock band” in the making, and as “pig-collaborators” by Abbie Hoffman, who never had the pleasure of protesting in Bucharest. More than it knows, this movie is an engaging, and sometimes enraging, exposé of chronic insularity. (I suggest viewing it as an ironic footnote, or a bonus track, to “The Free World,” a consummate study of the period by my colleague Louis Menand.) One of the group’s biggest hits, “And When I Die,” contains the line “All I ask of living is to have no chains on me.” Look closely at the footage of the Romanian fans, at a gig, and you will see a pair of hands raised high in celebration. They are joined together by a chain. ♦

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‘Inside’ Review: Willem Dafoe Is Riveting as a Thief Stuck Alone in a Gilded Cage

Director Vasilis Katsoupis concocts a clever premise and grand role for his star, but the story doesn’t have staying power.

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Willem Dafoe defies classification. He appears in blockbusters and arthouse films, in lead roles or as part of an ensemble. What can be counted on is that he’ll add a dash of idiosyncratic malevolence to whatever part he’s playing. Whether he’s playing Christ, Antichrist or somewhere in between, there’s always something slightly off that makes him watchable. In “ Inside ,” director Vasilis Katsoupis provides him with a showcase part in what is essentially a one-man show that Dafoe carries with aplomb.

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Dafoe’s an inventive and agile character actor, handsome and appealing but also possessing distinctive malleable features. All this makes him perfect for this one-man show, as he’s never less than immensely watchable. He’s called upon to telegraph Nemo’s emotional state through his body. Images of his back and hunched shoulders fill the frame. He’s shown on the floor in the fetus position and the camera patiently closes up on the creases of his neck and hands. His body becomes a canvas for the filmmakers to convey not just the loneliness of the character but also the unnecessariness of collecting art as possessions. All these beautiful pieces cannot sustain Nemo in any way.

Halfway into a mostly silent performance, Nemo playacts as if he’s a cook in a TV show. His solitary existence drives him to talk back to the security footage on the TV. What a welcome relief to hear Dafoe’s voice and see him animated with emotion. Finally he gets to do something other than the silent poses he has been doing for most of the running time. In so doing, “Inside” reveals what’s been absent all along.

With this premise, there’s ultimately no place to go. As the story unfolds, the audience feels as stuck as Nemo, with no escape in sight. The film has exhausted both the premise and its leading man’s capabilities, while the audience has grown tired of pondering whatever themes it purports to examine. It’s time to part ways, and yet the images keep flickering on screen and the film keeps going. “Inside” has an intriguing premise and an actor who makes whatever’s thrown at him intriguingly watchable. What it lacks is sufficient sense of who this character is, and a resonant enough narrative to justify being locked up together.

Reviewed online, March 15, 2023. In Berlin Film Festival. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 105 MIN.

• Production: (U.K.-Germany-Belgium-Switzerland-Greece) A Focus Features release, presented in association with Film-Und Medienstiftung, NRW, Eurimages, Greek Film Center, Screen Flanders, MFG Baden-Würtemberg, German Federal Film Fund, Bord Cadre Films, Sovereign Films, Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media of a Heretic, Schiwgo Film, A Private View production, in co-production with BNP Paribas, Fortis Film Finance, ERT, MMC Movies. Producers: Giorgos Karnavas, Marcos Kantis, Dries Phlypo. Executive producers: Jim Stark, Vasilis Katsoupis, Konstantinos Kontovrakis, Charles E. Breitkreuz, Martin Lehwald, Jean-Claude, Van Rijckeghem, Stephen Kelliher.
• Crew: Director: Vasilis Katsoupis. Writer: Ben Hopkins. Camera: Steven Annis. Production Designer: Thorsten Sabel. Art Curator: Leonardo Bigazzi. Editor: Lambis Haralambidis.
• With: Willem Dafoe.

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Inside review: Being stuck in a room with Willem Dafoe is pretty thrilling

Dafoe plays an art thief trapped in a high-tech manhattan apartment in this cunning, immersive art world critique.

With his acerbic eyes on the brink of mischief, and a knowing smile that often suggests something a little darker than meets the eye, Willem Dafoe, the star of The Last Temptation Of The Christ and At Eternity’s Gate , is among cinema’s great burdened souls. For Inside , Dafoe puts to work every angular muscle and wrinkle of his visage to unnerving effect. He’s the perfect lead for writer-director Vasilis Katsoupis’ resourceful and immersive survival tale, one that puts a gradually tortured protagonist through the wringer in unimaginable ways.

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In fact, Dafoe is pretty much the only character in this unexpectedly thrilling psychodrama, save for a maid that his character sees through the intercom of the luxury high-rise apartment he’s stuck in, and a poor pigeon with a grim fate as wretched as his. It all starts when Nemo (Dafoe), an agile and crafty art thief, swiftly enters the coldly chic and high-tech midtown Manhattan penthouse in question, home to a well-heeled artist with an impressive collection of artwork, from Egon Schiele to Francesco Clemente.

The drill is simple enough: Nemo needs to move quickly through the sparsely decorated, ultra-sophisticated space and collect the priceless works of art (authentic works gathered for the film by curator Leonardo Bigazzi) with the help of a voice on the other end of his walkie-talkie he calls Number 3. But when the apartment’s seemingly unbreakable security system malfunctions on Nemo’s way out, all possible avenues of exit are shut down and Number 3 vanishes, leaving Nemo abandoned inside an unfriendly space that’s unwilling to provide for his basic needs like food, water, and livable temperature levels.

While it’s a bit of a cliché to refer to a film location as a character in its own right, doing so for Inside is perhaps the only way to do justice to the level of heavy-lifting done by Thorsten Sabel’s ingenious production design in telling this story. Indeed, every part of the penthouse where the entirety of Inside unfolds is a tool in Ben Hopkins’ script (which was developed from an idea by Katsoupis). Broadly speaking, their joint effort resembles an escape room challenge or, more accurately, a quiet (and sometimes humorous) survival saga like All Is Lost where wealth and luxury (instead of mother nature) are the perilous sources of a hostile environment containing scores of priceless art that are as useful to Nemo as wads of cash would be to Robinson Crusoe on a desert island.

Still, that Nemo is an artist—at least twice, his voiceover tells us that his sketchbook is among his most-prized possessions—comes in handy to the lonesome fighter. Throughout Inside , he operates like an engineer-cum-installation artist, capable of building a makeshift escape ladder to the skylight of the apartment’s impossibly high ceilings. Before that, he carves a hole in a handsomely ornate wood door frame only to (expectedly) hit its steely foundation. Then he eliminates other escape options like trying to be heard or seen as he comes to realize that the wealth he’s encased in has made him inaccessible—as the owner of the space intended. So he breaks, destroys, unscrews, and mounts the furniture available to him, hoping to climb out of his spacious prison that gradually malfunctions with extreme hot and cold temperatures. To make matters worse, he has no water except for a timed indoor sprinkler and no food to speak of other than a few cans of innutritious food and some crackers.

Throughout this one-location nail-biter, you can unambiguously see the collaboration between Katsoupis, Hopkins and Sabel expanding the story’s scope in ways both economical and smart and with the backdrop of a distancing and icy Brutalist aesthetic. Also noteworthy is Bigazzi’s cohesiveness—the artworks he’s selected (especially a family photograph) focus on the eyes, creating a collectively spine-tingling sense that Nemo is constantly being watched from within.

As with most works of art, the message of Inside is in the eye of the beholder. It’s possible to read this original exercise as a critique of extreme wealth and pretentiousness in the art world, neither of which can nourish one’s body or save a human from their eventual demise. It’s also possible to get overwhelmed, bored or feel unmoved by the repetitiveness of it all as time and seasons pass, Nemo’s feces accumulates and the once stonily elegant flat becomes uninhabitable. This critic firmly leans towards the former reading—it is in fact admirable that Katsoupis leaves Inside open-ended without getting heavy-handed or preachy. Still, the greatest asset of the picture is Dafoe’s finesse in a part that’s both physically demanding and fiendishly fun to witness. It’s like someone dropped him in the middle of an antique shop with a baseball bat and said, “Go to town!” And that he does.

( Inside opens in theaters March 17)

'Inside' Review: Willem Dafoe Descends into Madness in Unnerving Exploration of Art | Berlinale 2023

'Inside' is deeply concerned with the purpose of art, but it still manages to be equally tense and entertaining.

What's the purpose of art? The most cynical among us might say it's to be used for tax evasion maneuvers, money laundry, and as investment assets for the wealthy – and we wouldn't be wrong. But there's also an undeniable force that pulls us all into creating meaning. Creation fascinates humans, from the most successful artists to a kid scrabbling a notebook. Still, when pushed to the brink of existence and forced to fight for survival, can we keep finding a reason for art to exist? Starring Willem Dafoe as art thief Nemo, Vasilis Katsoupis ’ Inside is deeply concerned with these questions, while still managing to fit a complex discussion in the middle of a thriller that's equally tense and entertaining.

Inside follows Nemo as he's sent to steal some expensive artwork from the well-secured New York flat of an art collector. Unfortunately for Nemo, the apartment's security system goes haywire before he gets out with the loot, sealing every exit shut with unbreakable glass and thick metal locks. Ultimately, the robbery gone wrong condemns Nemo to a challenging stay inside a concrete cage. Nemo's support team abandons the thief as soon as things go south. And since the flat is more of a personal gallery than a living space, there's no way of telling when the apartment's owner might return. So, alone, trapped, and with no means of communicating with the outside, Nemo must figure out how to survive long enough so he can manage to escape.

It's easy to approach Inside as yet another pandemic-inspired film that shows the dangers of isolation. All the main elements of this growing subgenre are there, including Nemo's slow descent into madness as he's deprived of any human contact. But it would be a mistake to condense the movie into a single note, as Inside is, above all, about the intrinsic connection between art and the human desire to exist beyond the confines of time.

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In Inside , Nemo tries to do whatever he can to stay alive, as would anyone else. Because as much as we are used to the everyday comforts of our lives, there's also primal energy pushing us to survive, making death and oblivion the biggest enemies of the human spirit. Pulling through won't be easy, though, as Nemo must get creative to find food, water, and shelter from a climate control that alternates between trying to cook and freeze the thief. That means Inside turns Nemo into the manifestation of human endurance, thrilling the audience as he beats the odds and keeps stretching his life, one day at a time. Katsoupis abuses close-up to show the details of Nemo’s suffering and grit, letting viewers observe drops of sweat running down Dafoe’s back or the actor’s lips cracking due to the extreme temperatures. In Inside , Dafoe’s body becomes the center of the movie’s bizarre art exposition as the ultimate representation of what the human will can achieve.

In Nemo’s dire situation, the priceless objects of art and decoration spread everywhere in the flat lose meaning. A short narration in Inside ’s introduction underlines how Nemo recognizes the value of art as a projection of human perseverance. Nevertheless, when faced with death, Nemo won't hesitate to tear the flat apart, stripping art of its contemplative nature to turn it into a pragmatic survival tool. This destructive process is mesmerizing, as it reveals how even the most priceless work of art can be reduced to just a piece of metal, tissue, or paper, ready to feed Nemo's creativity as he tries to find emergency exits. On the threshold of existence, Nemo exposes the harsh truth that art, in itself, has no purpose, at least in the most material sense of the word.

Still, Inside doesn’t allow itself to offer catharsis by destroying rich people’s properties. The movie wants to take one step further and show how art is not obsolete. As he spends his days alone in the flat, Nemo still takes time to draw the things and people he sees through windows and cameras, using pen and paper to process his need for human affection. He also turns the fruits of his labor into pieces of altars and finds levity through rituals that only make sense as prolongations of his interior universe. In short, while Nemo is destroying the cold and static works of art he finds in the flat, he’s also creating art as an extension of his mind, leaving behind traces of his existence that will survive long after his flesh perishes. And that’s the true beauty of Inside , as the thriller becomes both a story about Nemo’s survival instincts and his desire to make art.

Art, as an object, doesn’t have a purpose. Art, as a testament to humanity's unique ability to cheat death, gives meaning to our fragile lives.

Inside can be approached by people looking for a new confinement thriller but willing to overthink its philosophy. But it also can give people interested in art many fresh and exciting ideas to discuss. Everything is glued together by another Dafoe performance that proves he’s one of the greatest actors of all time, especially when given enough room to tap into the lunacy of his characters. In short, Katsoupis managed to craft a crowd pleaser that still has something interesting to say.

Inside had its world premiere at 2023’s Berlin Film Festival.

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘Inside’: A gilded cage, with only art for company

Willem dafoe stars in an art-house survival thriller that poses an intriguing question: what good is art if you can’t eat it.

Imagine “ The Martian ” — the 2015 Oscar-nominated survival drama starring Matt Damon as an astronaut who must use his wits to survive after he is stranded on the Red Planet — except this time the story takes place in an unoccupied luxury penthouse in Manhattan. The hero? An aesthete/art thief (Willem Dafoe) who has accidentally locked himself inside the place, with little besides the owner’s art collection to keep him company. That, at least, is the bare bones of the movie “Inside.”

But the film ups the ante on the conventional survival-thriller genre of “ Cast Away ” and its ilk by posing an intriguing question: If you can’t eat, drink or wear art — if its pleasures and purpose are purely aesthetic at minimum, and spiritual at best — what earthly good is it? It’s a question that, under the circumstances of the film, is far from rhetorical.

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Dafoe plays a burglar named Nemo (Latin for “no one”) in the heady narrative debut of Greek filmmaker Vasilis Katsoupis, working from a screenplay by Ben Hopkins. In the opening minutes, Nemo breaks into the residence of an unnamed Pritzker Prize-winning architect easily enough, looking primarily for a self-portrait by Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918), valued at $3 million. Instead, he initially finds only plenty of other, more contemporary works: Adrian Paci’s “Temporary Reception Center,” a still from a video of refugees lined up on airport ramp stairs; a watercolor nude by Francesco Clemente, commissioned specifically for the film; photographic documentation of Maurizio Cattelan’s 1999 installation piece, in which the artist temporarily duct-taped art dealer Massimo De Carlo to a gallery wall; and a neon sculpture by David Horvitz that reads, “All the time that will come after this moment.”

Among the names included in the closing credits — what the film calls the “Inside Art Collection” — are Joanna Piotrowska , Petrit Halilaj and other emerging artists.

None of it is mere set dressing. The movie has its own curator: Leonardo Bigazzi from the Florence-based organization Fondazione In Between Art Film , which explores the dialogue between the disciplines of moving and still images.

The allusions to crucifixion, martyrdom, entrapment, escape, time and eternity are fully intentional. A security system kicks in when Nemo tries to leave with his loot, imprisoning him. The rest of the film, which seems to transpire over weeks, if not months, consists of the protagonist trying to survive or get out. He screams to attract the attention of an oblivious maid (Eliza Stuyck) in the hallway outside the fortresslike front door. He constructs a mountain of furniture to reach an impossibly high skylight.

In between, Nemo talks to himself a little — the dialogue is sparse — at times musing on the nature and value of beauty. Since the plumbing isn’t working for some reason, he drinks water from sprinklers meant to feed the houseplants. He eats whatever he can scrounge up, including, at one point, tropical fish. And he evacuates his bowels into a cistern sunken in the middle of the living room.

Making matters worse, Nemo has somehow broken the apartment’s temperature control touch panel, so the climate fluctuates between 106 and 43 degrees. When Nemo holds open the door of the “smart” refrigerator for more than 20 seconds to cool down, it automatically plays “Macarena.”

It’s enough to drive anyone insane.

We already know from “ The Lighthouse ” and “ At Eternity’s Gate ” that Dafoe excels at this sort of thing (movies about isolation, madness and art, that is). And “Inside” — more art-house drama than thriller — is cut from that same cloth. Its fascination, if that’s the right word, is with existential questions, not engineering ones.

“Inside” is a one-man show. Its rewards — such as they are, in this bleakly depressing thought exercise — will depend entirely on your appreciation of its star. Is it entertaining? Nemo has only art for company. We at least have Willem Dafoe.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong language, some sexual material and nude images. 105 minutes.

'Inside': Willem Dafoe dominates this thriller. Good, because it would be awful without him

Willem Dafoe is a great actor, legendarily intense and committed to his roles.

If you need a reminder, “Inside” is the movie for you. It’s all Dafoe, all the time — basically a one-man show, with the exception of some brief dream sequences — and he is customarily all in on his performance.

The film itself, directed by Vasilis Katsoupis, is similarly intense but not as appealing; without an actor like Dafoe at its center (and margins and everywhere else), it would be unwatchable torture. With him, it’s more like watchable torture, easier to admire than enjoy.

Dafoe plays Nemo, a thief dropped off by helicopter at a luxury New York penthouse apartment, stocked to the gills with museum-quality modern art. Not just any thief, Nemo, he graces us with a VoiceOver introduction where he recalls a teacher’s question when he was a child: If your house was burning down, what would you save?

He went with the cat, an AC/DC CD and his sketchbook.

“Cats die,” he says. “Music fades. But art is for keeps.”

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What is 'Inside' about? It's simple. And not

But who gets to keep it? Whatever the case, Nemo is in walkie-talkie contact with “Number 3,” an unseen partner who relays codes and messages to help him navigate the apartment.

Nemo is briefly concerned when one of the pieces they’ve targeted isn’t where it should be. But he has bigger problems ahead. An exit code proves wonky and shuts down the apartment, locking Nemo in. (Number 3, not exactly a chapter entry in “Profiles in Courage,” bails immediately. “You’re on your own” is his inspiring sign-off.)

What’s more, the computer-controlled systems in the apartment crash. So there’s no water from the tap. And the temperature inside begins rising to Phoenix-in-summer levels. (Later it will plunge to frigid levels.)

What follows is Nemo’s attempt to survive inside well-appointed luxury, which suddenly has become as dangerous and forbidding as the middle of the desert (or, depending, Antarctica). The refrigerator still works but is barely stocked (and plays “Macarena” if you leave the door ajar too long).

There are a couple of fish tanks — perhaps you can guess where that is leading — as well as a small pool. There is a small amount of food, mostly snacks, like moldy bread and a tin of caviar, a combo no foodie saw coming. A watering system for the indoor plants proves useful.

Attempts to chop his way out of the ornate wooden front door do not work. Nor does trying to toss heavy artwork through the windows, which are unbreakable.

He watches the multi-feed security camera until he’s on a first-name basis with the maid who can’t hear his shouts. He hosts his own imaginary cooking show. And he begins to see art as utilitarian, not so much by choice as necessity.

Nemo also begins to create his own art. Some of his psychic adventures seem to suggest a descent into madness, but he remains committed to using the pricey furniture to build a tower to try to get to the skylight in the high ceiling, a possible means of escape.

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Here's the real statement 'Inside' makes

Katsoupis, who is credited for the idea (Ben Hopkins wrote the script), doubtless wants to say something profound about the value of art here. About who should have it? About its value? About its meaning in a world in which its value is fuel or as a tool?

It’s muddled. But he inadvertently has made a statement about art anyway — the art of acting. By unleashing Dafoe’s talent on what essentially becomes a horror story of entrapment and escape, he allows the actor artistry to overwhelm the rest of his message. If that’s an accident, at least it’s a happy one.

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'Inside' 3 stars

Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★

Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★

Director: Vasilis Katsoupis.

Cast: Willem Dafoe.

Rating: R for language, some sexual content and nude images.

How to watch: In theaters March 17.

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‘Inside’ review: A close-up view of Willem Dafoe’s descent into madness

Movie review.

How you feel about the psychological thriller “Inside” may depend on how you feel about spending the better part of two hours staring nonstop at Willem Dafoe. The actor plays Nemo, an art thief who becomes trapped in a posh Manhattan penthouse after the security system malfunctions. Time goes by — days, weeks, months — and we’re alone with Nemo, who does some impressive MacGyvering of the furniture, eats some things I’d rather not contemplate and starts to lose his grip on reality.

As might you, by the end of “Inside,” which grimly catalogs the slow deterioration of the apartment and of Nemo. Director Vasilis Katsoupis , working from a screenplay by Ben Hopkins, utilizes numerous extreme close-ups of his star (and not just his face; seriously, by the end of this film, I felt like I could identify the nape of Dafoe’s neck in a lineup) and glides right over any questions we might have about the plausibility of the plot. Nemo knows no one who might be looking for him? No one in the building heard banging in a supposedly unoccupied apartment? Rich people really turn off the water supply to their apartment when they go out of town? None of this matters; “Inside” is not about logic, it is about survival, about what it means to have art when you have nothing else, about what happens when life comes down to just being.

These are potentially interesting themes, but “Inside” doesn’t fully engage with them, nor does it give us much of a sense of Nemo’s full story (who was this man, before he got trapped in a heist gone wrong?). Instead, it becomes something of a horror film, in which the apartment — an ultramodern aerie whose furnishings seem aggressively uncomfortable, lit in a chilly blue light — appears to be trying to kill Nemo. The heat unbearably zooms up and then plummets, the water and food supply quickly becomes perilous, the closed-circuit video of people in the lobby and hallways going about their lives feels like torture. Meanwhile, the art seems to be watching, taunting him — it’s both priceless and worthless, as it can’t help him now — and time goes by … very, very slowly.

But the film’s not-so-secret weapon is Dafoe, an ever-intriguing actor who’s incapable of a flat performance. Like Robert Redford trapped alone on a slowly sinking boat in “ All Is Lost ” (the two films would make a fascinating if deeply depressing double feature), he believably creates a man slowly slipping away, yet determined to hang on to whatever toehold he can find. Dafoe, who has an uncanny way of aging before our eyes, finds detail everywhere: in the way Nemo nods after tasting water from the sprinkler, as if approving the wine; in his schticky narration of his dinner assembly, a performance to an audience of no one; in the raw animal panic on his face in the late scenes, as darkness falls. He can’t quite save “Inside,” but he does make you believe Nemo is worth saving.

With Willem Dafoe. Directed by Vasilis Katsoupis, from a screenplay by Ben Hopkins. 105 minutes. Rated R for language, some sexual content and nude images. Opens March 16 at multiple theaters.

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Movie Review – Inside (2023)

October 9, 2023 by Robert Kojder

Inside , 2023.

Directed by Vasilis Katsoupis. Starring Willem Dafoe, Gene Bervoets, Josia Krug, and Eliza Stuyck.

Nemo, a high-end art thief, is trapped in a New York penthouse after his heist doesn’t go as planned. Locked inside with nothing but priceless works of art, he must use all his cunning and invention to survive.

There isn’t much to the story or the lone character of director Vasilis Katsoupis’ sophomore feature Inside , but there is a high concept tied to lockdown parallels and the meaning of art that is too thinly written (the filmmaker also cowrites the screenplay alongside Ben Hopkins) but does also double as an isolation survival thriller that is squeezing every drop of talent and charisma out of Willem Dafoe and his highly expressive face (there are numerous close-ups on various parts of his body as the temperature drastically changes and affects him) as Nemo, and art thief disguised as a handyman breaking into a luxurious penthouse to loot three high-value self-portraits.

Before things quickly go downhill, Nemo communicates with a remote teammate while searching for the portraits. The first two are easily located, while the third seems to be in an unknown location, inaccurate to their expectations, which also causes an alarm to go off that disrupts the temperature system and locks Nemo inside the penthouse. Admittedly, the setup here is a stretch, but what the filmmakers do with it counts more.

While the production design is highly impressive, elaborately creating an absurdly rich home covered with eye-catching art and refrigerators that sing Macarena (which Willem Dafoe sings at one point, clearly drawing inspiration from his performance of slow descent into madness found in The Lighthouse ), the filmmakers ensure that Nemo is constantly up to a new tactic to escape hopefully.

He attempts everything from carving holes into walls to building makeshift ladders out of random objects to potentially reach a glass ceiling window to climb through, all while showing believable desperation that the janitor vacuuming the hallways might hear his screams from the soundproof front door. There are also security feeds showing what’s going on throughout the rest of the building, which is amusing and devastating for Nemo, observing and getting down the routines of the workers and the small joys of their lives while he unravels alone.

As previously mentioned, Nemo has to deal with a haywire temperature system that slowly increases to scorching levels of heat and then down to frigid cold, primarily because every time he tries to fix it, the problem worsens. This adds another layer to the survival elements, allowing creative ideas to deal with these overwhelming conditions.

The only glaring frustration is that because there is so little insight as to why Nemo is acting out this robbery (although based on his remarks about the paintings and his personal love for sketching and doodling, there does seem to be a grudge), the isolation and survival occasionally become repetitive and aren’t enough to sustain close to a two hour running time of immersion.

After spending considerable time with the concept, even when Inside introduces new escape methods or briefly interrupts itself for a small amount of backstory, there’s the sensation that the point has been made and that the film doesn’t have much more to offer. Once the narrative arrives at its grand commentary on art, which provides something to ponder, it’s still unlikely to stand out more than Willem Dafoe breaking down and losing his mind.

Inside is a reminder that Dafoe is such a gifted performer that his characters are easy to invest in, even without much depth, so long as the concept is suspenseful and engaging.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★  / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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Inside review: a dour, ill-conceived psychological drama

“Inside is an ambitious but ultimately ineffective psychological drama.”

• Willem Dafoe's go-for-broke solo performance
• An effectively disorienting pace
• A meandering, overlong story
• A disappointing lack of tension throughout
• A lackluster conclusion

Inside is a thoroughly unpleasant film. That isn’t a bug so much as it is a feature, though. The film, which comes from director Vasilis Katsoupis and writer Ben Hopkins, is a self-contained descent into the mind of one man who finds himself trapped in the most absurdly suffocating, bourgeoisie of settings. Despite what its trailers might have you believe, Inside isn’t much of a thriller, either. The film is, instead, a test of not only its character’s patience, but also the audience’s. For nearly two hours, Katsoupis and Hopkins ask you to sit by and watch as one trapped art thief is forced to lower himself to his most animalistic standards in order to survive.

Inside is, in other words, a cinematic endurance test. Its displays of filth and madness grow over the course of its story until they reach such absurd lows that they’ll have you questioning what the point of any of it was in the first place. Unfortunately, Inside fails to offer a satisfying answer to that question. In fact, outside of the commendable, go-for-broke performance at the center of it, there’s not much about Inside that’s worth recommending. The film is ultimately just as shallow as the ankle-high pond that sits at the center of the New York City penthouse apartment where Inside ’s story unfolds.

The film, to either its credit or its fault, tries to keep the surface-level depth of its story hidden for as long as possible. The drama’s opening minutes set it up to be the kind of bare-bones, but efficient heist-gone-wrong thriller that it most definitely is not. Over the course of its prologue, viewers watch as the film’s central art thief, Nemo (Willem Dafoe), infiltrates a high-security NYC penthouse owned by a renowned artist and begins looting some of the paintings and sculptures that are scattered throughout the apartment.

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Everything goes wrong when a system malfunction triggers the apartment’s highest security measures, which not only seal Dafoe’s Nemo inside behind impenetrable steel doors and bulletproof glass windows, but also shut off the penthouse’s electricity and plumbing. Abandoned by his fellow heist members, Nemo quickly begins to realize that his out-of-town mark’s apartment has now become the prison he may very well die in. From that point on, Nemo’s desperation to survive only continues to grow until he’s willing to not only eat dog food, but also scale dangerously high stacks of rearranged furniture on the slim chance that they might lead him to freedom.

The places Inside eventually goes aren’t nearly as interesting as its first act suggests. That fact doesn’t take away from how genuinely effective the first 20 minutes or so of Inside are. After throwing the film’s initial heist premise out the window, Katsoupis and Hopkins spend Inside ‘s opening minutes stacking problem upon problem on Dafoe’s Nemo until the sense of dread created by his seemingly inescapable situation has become overwhelming. The early moments where Nemo successfully disables his new prison’s blaring alarms and figures out how to take full advantage of its miniature garden’s sprinkler system also set Inside up to be a Man Escaped -esque, Robert Bresson-inspired minimalist thriller.

It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that Inside ultimately doesn’t end up going that route. Instead, the film spends most of its second and third acts pursuing surreal detours and lingering on moments of quiet, increasingly dull madness. At first, the latter scenes, including one where Dafoe’s Nemo decides to tell a joke to an entire imaginary crowd of listeners, hit with a considerable level of startling sharpness. By the time Nemo’s puppeteering chairs and singing the same songs over and over again to himself, though, the film has lost so much tension that even Dafoe’s biggest moments of crazed desperation end up feeling more superfluous than shocking or unnerving.

Rather than maintaining a constant strain of tension, Inside becomes so wrapped up in wallowing in the misery of its protagonist’s situation that any sense of urgency or suspense has utterly disintegrated by the time the film has reached its halfway point. While  Inside  tosses in more than a few moments of surreal fantasy throughout its runtime as well, very few of them actually land with any real weight. Behind the camera, Katsoupis’ visual style feels so suffocatingly controlled that it prevents Inside from ever truly reaching the kind of surreal, dreamlike heights that it so desperately aims for.

Of the film’s surreal sequences, the only one that leaves much of a lasting impression sees Dafoe’s Nemo briefly fantasize about a maid (Eliza Stuyck) he’s watched through a set of security cameras make her way into his penthouse prison and share a moment of restrained intimacy with him. Katsoupis’ camera cuts extremely close to Dafoe’s lips and cheeks throughout the scene, and Steve Annis’ cinematography lovingly captures the moments when Stuyck’s maid traces her lips and fingers along Nemo’s face without ever actually touching him.

The scene is one of the only moments where Inside feels locked into its protagonist’s emotions and loneliness. For the rest of its runtime, Inside feels far too preoccupied with maintaining a cold, omniscient perspective. While it briefly feints toward interesting ideas about the way in which wealth and art have become toxically linked in the 21st century as well, Inside never pursues any of its various ideas deeply enough for them to feel fully baked or thought-provoking. The fact that the film’s story concludes with a series of suggestive images rather than a dose of concrete catharsis (or even dark humor) only makes it that much more clear just how badly Katsoupis has gauged what moviegoers may actually want from Inside ’s story.

It’s the tragic irony at the heart of Inside that, much like its protagonist, the film never really ends up going anywhere.

Inside is now playing in theaters.

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Andrew Dominik’s Blonde opens, quite fittingly, with the flashing of bulbs. In several brief, twinkling moments, we see a rush of images: cameras flashing, spotlights whirring to life, men roaring with excitement (or anger — sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference), and at the center of it all is her, Marilyn Monroe (played by Ana de Armas), striking her most iconic pose as a gust of wind blows up her white dress. It’s an opening that makes sense for a film about a fictionalized version of Monroe’s life, one that firmly roots the viewer in the world and space of a movie star. But to focus only on de Armas’ Marilyn is to miss the point of Blonde’s opening moments.

As the rest of Dominik’s bold, imperfect film proves, Blonde is not just about the recreation of iconic moments, nor is it solely about the making of Monroe’s greatest career highlights. It is, instead, about exposure and, in specific, the act of exposing yourself — for art, for fame, for love — and the ways in which the world often reacts to such raw vulnerability. In the case of Blonde, we're shown how a world of men took advantage of Monroe’s vulnerability by attempting to control her image and downplay her talent.

Meet Cute wants to be a lot of things at once. The film, which premieres exclusively on Peacock this week, is simultaneously a manic time travel adventure, playful romantic comedy, and dead-serious commentary on the messiness of romantic relationships. If that sounds like a lot for one low-budget rom-com to juggle — and within the span of 89 minutes, no less — that’s because it is. Thanks to the performance given by its game lead star, though, there are moments when Meet Cute comes close to pulling off its unique tonal gambit.

Unfortunately, the film’s attempts to blend screwball comedy with open-hearted romanticism often come across as hackneyed rather than inspired. Behind the camera, director Alex Lehmann fails to bring Meet Cute’s disparate emotional and comedic elements together, and the movie ultimately lacks the tonal control that it needs to be able to discuss serious topics like depression in the same sequence that it throws out, say, a series of slapstick costume gags.  The resulting film is one that isn't memorably absurd so much as it is mildly irritating.

Pearl is a candy-coated piece of rotten fruit. The film, which is director Ti West’s prequel to this year's X, trades in the desaturated look and 1970s seediness of its parent film for a lurid, Douglas Sirk-inspired aesthetic that seems, at first, to exist incongruently with its story of intense violence and horror. But much like its titular protagonist, whose youthful beauty and Southern lilt masks the monster within, there’s a poison lurking beneath Pearl’s vibrant colors and seemingly untarnished Depression-era America setting.

Set around 60 years before X, West’s new prequel does away with the por nstars, abandoned farms, and eerie old folks that made its predecessor’s horror influences clear and replaces them with poor farmers, charming film projectionists, and young women with big dreams. Despite those differences, Pearl still feels like a natural follow-up to X. The latter film, with its use of split screens and well-placed needle drops, offered a surprisingly dark rumination on the horror of old age. Pearl, meanwhile, explores the loss of innocence and, in specific, the often terrifying truths that remain after one’s dreams have been unceremoniously ripped away from them.

Inside Man's Shocking Ending Is a Massive Plot Hole

Spike Lee's Inside Man is a thrilling bank heist movie, but the end gets too smart for its own good and creates a major plot hole with Dalton.

• The big twist in Inside Man reveals Dalton was hidden inside the bank with diamonds, but the entire concept is far-fetched.
• Despite the twist's unbelievable nature, Inside Man remains one of the best heist movies, enthralling audiences till the end.
• The 2019 sequel, Inside Man: Most Wanted , bears almost no resemblance to the original film and lacks the essence of the classic heist movie.

As much as Spike Lee's Inside Man was a bank heist movie, it was also, at its heart, a story about social justice. Initially, it felt like the robbers, led by Dalton (Clive Russell), were simply stringing along the police. Marshaled by Detective Frazier (Denzel Washington), the robbers hatched a plan to escape among the hostages. However, as cool as the finale was, it has a major plot hole.

The cops' raiding was a pretty weird decision, considering the robbers indicated they would shoot civilians after faking a murder for the cameras. That said, Dalton wasn't with the robbers when they embedded themselves with the escapees. The big twist of Inside Man 's ending was that he remained hidden in the storeroom.

Updated by Jordan Iacobucci on April 26, 2024: Spike Lee is one of the most prominent directors working in Hollywood today, with films like Do The Right Thing , Malcolm X, and BlacKkKlansman moving audiences to take a deeper look at their society and its racial norms. While not as thematically loaded as his other works, Spike Lee's Inside Man remains one of his best and most underrated films. A fun heist movie with a killer cast, Inside Man is especially memorable for its twist ending, which turned the tables on viewers who thought they knew exactly what was going on. What is this twist ending and how did it come to be?

The Twist Ending of Inside Man, Explained

How kaleidoscope pulls off a better heist than ocean's eleven.

The big twist ending is what the title of the film -- Inside Man -- refers to. Dalton literally remained inside the bank with mysterious diamonds and walked out a week later just like he said he would, leaving clues to the bank owner's nasty Nazi past. But this required a lot of luck to pull off after they retrofitted the stock room. It's ridiculous that no one noticed the room was smaller. Furthermore, Dalton occupied that small space without sneezing, snoring, or making any noise to let people know he was hidden behind the wall. The fact that he had his own toilet is preposterous as well since it was just a hole in the floor. Not to mention, if someone came for material in the printer boxes -- something popular in banks due to frequent document printing -- the ruse would have been up.

In addition, when Dalton crawled out from the confined space, he had no one keeping watch, so anyone could have caught him in the act. As he left the room, people in the corridor watched him in shock because no one saw anyone go in that direction. It didn't help that he was dressed casually and held bags, looking like he had just robbed the bank. Simply put, he looked way too suspicious, which was why an executive coming down the stairs even did a double-take. However, the fact no one raised a red flag seems unlikely, and it's a major risk that could have scuppered the flick's entire premise. As Dalton departed, the guards were stunned too. After all, they knew everyone coming in and out of that one entrance. Yet, when Dalton caught their attention, they just looked at each other quizzically rather than interrogate him about leaving a bank with a giant bag.

Despite Inside Man's Massive Plothole, It's Still A Great Movie

Ryan reynolds' heist comedy film finds streaming home after intense bidding war.

The heist film's big twist doesn't make for one of the worst movie endings of all time , but its ridiculousness certainly leads to plenty of unanswered questions. Ultimately, Inside Man 's big finale is all plot convenience . Dalton had to escape to allow Frazier to go after the Nazi ring he left in the vault. Ironically, Dalton prided himself on not being seen, despite being spotted by many people and cameras. Not even sunglasses could have hidden his face, and it undid all the work he laid down for the heist where he blinded the cameras. It didn't feel as believable as if he had someone on the inside helping pave the way for an exit. The whole sequence was out of character for Dalton, who was too calculating and would never rely on sheer luck.

Even though Inside Man 's ending leaves some viewers scratching their heads, it still deserves to be counted among some of the best heist movies ever made . Fun, unpredictable, and energetic, Spike Lee's 2006 movie can't help but keep audiences entertained from beginning to end. Even if the big twist is a bit unbelievable if one thinks about it for too long, audiences are generally willing to go along with it, which is the key to pulling off a twist in any movie. Whether realistic or not, Dalton's surprise strategy works both in the film and for audiences, making it one of the most memorable twists in any heist film.

Is There A Sequel To Inside Man?

Spike lee explains key scene that oppenheimer was missing.

In a world chock-full of unwanted sequels to great films , it was inevitable that a memorable classic like Inside Man would fall victim to the same problem. In 2019, thirteen years after the original film came out, Netflix released a sequel entitled Inside Man: Most Wanted . The film includes almost no connection whatsoever to the original film, with an entirely new cast of characters and a heist that has nothing to do with that of its predecessor. Most Wanted is a sequel to Inside Man in name only, bearing almost no resemblance to the original whatsoever.

The film takes place five years after the events of Inside Man, following the chaos that takes place when a group of bank robbers take over the Federal Bank of New York in an effort to steal the valuable Nazi gold hidden deep within the building. The robbers are led by Airella Barash, played by Roxanne McKee, who calls herself by the codename "Most Wanted." The ongoing hostage situation at the bank leads negotiators Remy Darbonne, played by Aml Ameen, and Dr. Brynn Stewart, played by Better Call Saul 's Rhea Seehorn , to try to diffuse the situation and get everyone out alive. What follows is a tense standoff that leaves many dead.

Inside Man: Most Wanted is a disappointing follow-up to Spike Lee's classic 2006 heist film, failing to capture the energy or the fun twists of the original. Even for all its flaws, Most Wanted is enjoyable enough for a single viewing, especially for those who enjoy the occasional heist thriller. Even so, Lee's Inside Man stands out as one of the best of its genre, even almost two decades after its release. The film's talented cast and clever twists make it far more memorable than its 2019 successor, though both lack a certain plausibility that makes other heist films more realistic.

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The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.

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• 62 User reviews
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• Trivia Marisa Abela had done most of the singing in this film herself. She trained extensively to mimic Amy Winehouse 's vocals.

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Inside No. 9 – Season 9, Episode 1

Boo to a goose, more like this, cast & crew.

Steve Pemberton

Reece Shearsmith

Philippa Dunne

Inside No. 9 — Season 9, Episode 1

Episode info.