How far is too far? At what point does a horror movie cease to be entertainingly disturbing and become just plain unpleasant and unenjoyable? I wondered this going into Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury's Inside/À l'Intérieur, given that what little I knew about it was that it was a movie about some nut or nuts menacing a pregnant woman. The bloody scissors on the DVD itself, moreover, indicated it would be a movie about someone's attempt to cut the baby out of the pregnant woman's stomach. This is all, needless to say, rather difficult material to "enjoy," but you know me, I've probably seen worse. Did I mention we had a miscarriage a couple months ago? God help me I actually thought I'd enjoy the movie more because of that. It's a trauma I'm close to, and I come to horror for the trauma.

Anyway, given the air of menace that surrounded the very idea of the film for me--reminiscent of Hostel in that regard--I knew I'd be in for a rough evening, but like I said, that's what I'm here for. And early on the movie didn't disappoint. I mean, hey, it starts with a fetuscam view of a fatal car accident in which the pregnant star's husband is killed. Then there's some obligatory business at the hospital and with her mother and her editor (she's a photojournalist) to show that she's lost the lust for life. Then she goes home and someone starts menacing her, sure enough. There are the expected homages as one would find in pretty much any indie-ish horror movie these days--Aliens, Hellraiser, The Descent, Halloween. There's the expected business with threatening the pregnant woman's belly with sharp objects. It's all pretty tense and engaging. Then it gets a little silly when some unexpected guests arrive, and things go down in sort of the most pat and/or over-the-top ways possible, but hey, lots of horror movies have missteps here and there. The gore is unflinching and, for the most part, not splattery but genuinely brutal; the score is creative and impressive, clearly building on John Carpenter but doing its own unexpected things with some frequency. Like all great kill-or-be-killed thrillers it seeds little clues here and there as to what will happen later in the film, and keeps you guessing as to which guns on the mantel will go off and which won't. It makes you wonder what the killer's connection to our heroine is and why she's so nuts, and whether her vague ethnicity has something to do with the banlieu riots constantly being referenced by the news reports and the editor character or whether that's just a headfake. In other words, it's disturbing but in a good way.

Then the killer grabs the heroine's cat.

Sorry, folks, that's all she wrote for me! I'm not trying to make any kind of grand sweeping political statement about what's okay to show in movies and what's not. In the past I've enjoyed a decent number of movies in which pretty rotten things happen to animals--usually at the hands/paws/claws/teeth of other animals/dinosaurs/xenomorphs/whatever, but certainly not always, right, Christofuh and Cosette?--and I expect it can and will happen again. But no, no thanks, not for me, not in this movie, not when the point of the movie truly is to be maximally brutal and unpleasant about everything it touches. I mean, on one level it just reduces everything to a kind of bloody white noise, like an attempt to push every button and it all cancels each other out--you could object to it that way. On another level it seems like a bit of a gimmick, like "hey, this lady's really awful, look, she'll kill an innocent cat, what a psycho, look out for your unborn baby there, heroine!", like cheesy. On still another level it was predictable in that gun-on-the-mantel way--I swear to god, the second the pregnant lady opened the door to her house and the little black cat meowed a greeting to her I said to myself "Oh Christ, they better not hurt the goddamn cat."

You can object on all those levels. Maybe I object to it on all those levels! But really the only level I object to it on that matters is that I just don't enjoy watching movies about people killing cats. Maybe, maybe if I felt like the movie was up to more than just trying to be really scary and brutal, maybe. I think there are horror movies that have Something To Say, and not just in the American Nightmare/George A. Romero way, I mean something to say about life, something to say about the real horror of life, the horror that strikes you at 1 in the morning or 1 in the afternoon and you look at the world and you imagine your life stretching in front of you like a gray ribbon into the future and all around you and all in front of you are death death death, that horror, I think there are horror movies that have Something To Say about that. And to those movies, I say, if you wanna kill a cat, I'm probably okay with it. I think Inside is a movie about how scary it is when psychos chase pregnant ladies with scissors, and I don't want to watch them kill the cat. I turned it off without finishing it, without letting them finish, and I'm gonna send it back to Netflix and in my head, the cat's still alive, Schrödinger be damned, the cat's still alive.

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 7:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)