Is the idea of the starving artist more than just a cliché? Is starvation, in one way or another, actually a prerequisite for the artist to create truly exceptional work? Is misery the greatest muse of all? These questions are baked into Vasilis Katsoupis’ Inside, a movie that features Willem Dafoe as an unnamed art thief who gets locked in a sleek ultra-modern smart home. While he’s trapped in this high-rise temple to Architectural Digest, the burglar is subjected to all manner of punishments. A broken digital thermostat is causing him to endure punishing heat followed by freezing temperatures. The plumbing has been shut off. With little to no food or water, he’s struggling to get by on crackers and the few canned goods that have been left in the pantry.
Inside partly works due to the inherent interest we have in the old escape room challenge. It’s the kind of scenario that gets you asking, “what would I do?” Will this guy be able to McGuyver his way out of the box? Can he crack the code and find freedom? But there’s another part to Inside that the filmmakers are clearly more interested in, which is that Dafoe’s art thief was once an aspiring artist himself. And so, before long, it dawns on us that everything this sinewy old guy does in the apartment, whether through frustration, boredom, or desperation, is beginning to resemble contemporary art. The stacked up furniture that leads to a possible escape hatch, the defaced walls, the empty tins and other objects around the house that are placed together just so — everything starts to take on a Duchampian “readymade” object d’art type quality. Whatever Dafoe touches, the result looks like an installation you might find at a particularly post-post-modern MOMA exhibition.
Inside suggests that Dafoe’s character only achieves his full creative potential once he’s been subjected to a prolonged misery wherein he is literally struggling to stay alive on a day-by-day basis, In this way, it can be seen as a literal translation of the romantic yet banal notion that one must suffer for their art. I have a deep dislike for this trope, and I do so wish that movies would stop propagating it. Yet I have to admit that, since it’s Willem Dafoe playing the tortured artist, I was happy to go along with it.
If you’re at all familiar with Dafoe the actor, you’ll likely know that the man is nothing if not an art-lover. He often pops up in documentaries related to his friend the postmodern painter (and sometimes movie director) Julian Schnabel. He’s long been embedded in the downtown post-punk NYC art scene that was home to Andy Warhol, Abel Ferrara, and countless performance art spaces. Plus, in his breakthrough role in To Live and Die in LA he played a master counterfeiter who merged art and crime. So the role of tortured art thief is perfect for Dafoe. It’s a 100-minute one-man-show that allows him to (often wordlessly) luxuriate in ideas about the meaning, purpose, and process of making art.
Actually, your enjoyment of Inside can likely be measured by how much interest you have in pondering art’s potential. One of the pleasures of the film is how writer Ben Hopkins and director Vasilis Katsoupis use a purposeful selection of existing modern art to color the margins of the scenes and comment on the story. The paintings, video installations, and sculptures that fill the apartment all get their own credits at the end of the movie — perhaps the most famous being a provocative female portrait by Egon Schiele. They add serious weight to the theme of Dafoe’s character achieving transcendence through art. These pieces surround the trapped thief — they’re all he has to interact with — and their accumulative effect helps to answer the question: what is art for? By the end, you come to understand, it’s the thing that keeps you going, as well as the thing that can provide both escape and enlightenment.
Inside isn’t likely to rise above cult movie status. It’s too idiosyncratic. It’s just one guy in more or less one big room, struggling to stay alive. But there’s a lot of purposeful and effective style on display. On a technical level, it leaves you with a lot to admire (the movie is well-shot by Steve Annis, who did good work on the recent thrillers Color Out of Space and I Am Mother). On an intellectual level, it leaves you with just enough to think about.
