Inside (Unrated)

Four months after pregnant Sara loses her husband in a horrific auto accident, she is visited on Christmas Eve by a mysterious madwoman. Alone and desperate to save her unborn child, Sara fights to stay alive as each of her potential rescuers die at the womans sadistic hands. Hailed by several critics as the first great French horror film this millennium, Inside opens on a gory note and stays true to the bloodfest throughout. But rather than using splatter-gore for comedic effect, as did young directing team Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo's predecessor, Hershell Gordon-Lewis, this duo timed their gore to build tragic suspense, scene after disgusting scene. The strength of Inside's plot is its simplicity, though the film is slow at first. Pregnant photojournalist, Sarah Scaragato (Alysson Paradis), has just lost her husband in a fatal car accident and is in recovery when her baby is due on Christmas Eve, in fact. Morose, she rejects friend and family visits, opting to stay home. A bewitched predator, played by Beatrice Dalle, senses Sarah's vulnerability and seizes upon it like a spider capturing prey in its web. The tale, woven around maternal psychosis, reveals Dalle's haunting preoccupation with stealing Scaragato's unborn baby. Each character who enters Sarah's house, the "war zone" as one doomed policeman puts it, encounters the wrath of two women fighting with mirror shards, knitting needles, scissors, hurled kitchen appliances, and even a homemade bayonette. Like the best horror thrillers about motherhood---Rosemary's Baby, Don't Look Now, Alien---Inside seizes ample symbolic opportunities to exhibit the primal obsession women have with babies. Even better, Inside invites feminist critique as do other female-centric horror films such as Ginger Snaps, whose plots not only include strong, vengeful female victims, but also sympathetic, criminal femme fatales. An entertaining "Making of Inside" featurette follows, revealing makeup and special effects techniques. Inside is for a specific audience; as scenes get redder and wetter, the squeamish may find it sickening---beware and enjoy. —Trinie Dalton