A L'intérieur (2007)

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A L'intérieur

A L'intérieur (2007)
Also Known As: Inside (USA) (festival title)
MPAA: Rated R for strong bloody violence, gruesome and disturbing content, and language.
Runtime: 83 min | USA:75 min (R-rated cut)
Directors: Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury
Writer: Alexandre Bustillo

Review/Summary

Le Interior begins with a pretty cliché shot. It is a close-up of our protagonist. And it is a fetus. There is a violent noise, and our young hero is slammed against the uterine wall. A contusion splashes across nubile flesh and a bit of blood splatters. And it is going to keep splattering arterial red for the better part of the next two hours.

Le Interior ("Inside", in English) is a masterpiece of gore horror. If Dexter had gone into directing, rather than forensics, this is the movie he would have made. A film that bleeds its occupants to their limit. No more, and no less. This isn't a film where buckets of blood are tossed
by key grips, and the movie-goer can slap their knees and hoot with their friends about how this is the "goriest thing ever". This is a movie staffed by surgeons, taking each liter with calculated precision, applying it with horsehair brushes, and lighting the entire affair with directorial brilliance.

Does this sound like hyperbole? It isn't.

The opening car crash finds a dead husband, his face pulped by the windshield, and a pregnant wife blowing bubbles of blood, gasping for enough air for her and her fetus. A broken windshield wiper acts like a shattered metronome, pumping with the rhythm of the organ that this movie was made to celebrate. Thump. Thump. Thump.

A tourniquet is applied to the film as the drama builds. The wife is now clinically depressed and on the eve of having her labor induced. Christmas Eve. The night before THE birth. With very little, yet extremely poignant dialog, we feel this woman's suffering. She does not care about the child in her womb. She hardly cares about herself. She just wants to go home, alone, succumb to despair, and get this unwanted thing out of her belly in the morning. After her checkup that afternoon, her doctor advises her to enjoy "Her last night of peace". Before the wailing begins.

Sarah, our expectant mother, declines all comfort from friends and family. Her mother is not invited. Her best friend pushed away. Arrangements are made with her boss to collect her in the morning. She takes some sad photos of a happy couple with their child as she sits in the park and gives him her keys. One senses she would just prefer to go home and die.

Later that night, she is doing everything in her power to live. A strange woman has appeared at her door in the dark of night. A woman who knows her name. Knows about her dead husband. And demands to be let in. Our bad guy is a very non-stereotypical psycho. A goth Angelina Jolie. Tall, frail, manic, enraged, and yet madly calm.

Calm enough to rummage loudly in the bathroom as Sarah sleeps across the hall. Gathering scissors and some alcohol. At the bedside, the scissors get a slow, sterilizing dip, before one point is slowly inserted in Sarah's navel. Pressing now, a trickle of blood, an oozing tease, before our pregnant victim awakes violently.

She is stabbed in the stomach, her mouth is slashed open, a struggle, a kick, and before we have blinked these first splashes of blood out of our eyes, our heroine is locked in the bathroom as our psychotic Emo unleashes holy hell on the door.

This is one of the great, understated scenes of the movie for me. The manic front-kicks that Gia slams into the door, the way she slaps at it, stabbing it with her scissors, it does two things. It tells you that this woman is crazier than bumpercars full of bagladies. And that she is a regular person. The door is stronger than she is, which is not the horror norm. There is nothing supernatural about her except her rage. A rage that the viewer must find confusing. That the door is still standing after this bestial bout is testament to her human limitations, which makes her inhuman fury, twitching in this frail form, all the more sickening and intense.

At this point, my wife and I already guessed the big twist at the end of the film. This was the rage of a childless mother. Gia was here for the baby. But she was also here to hurt Sarah. At once I realized that we were privy to the rage of a mother who had lost her child, and must have lost it in the opening car crash. This was going to be a revenge killing and a kidnapping, all at once. That's why she couldn't wait until after the baby had been born. You almost sense that she would love nothing more than to cut that child out of Sarah herself.

But before we get to any potential Cesarean section, there are several other medical procedures to perform. We have a young boy who needs a frontal lobotomy. A police officer who gets a hemispherectomy. Sarah has to perform a tracheotomy on herself, in a gruesome scene where you can hear our heroine's whimpers as they escape the gurgling hole in her neck, gouged out with a knitting needle.

All of this takes place as every character in the film wades into this perfect canvas, only to have their own shade of crimson splashed realistically across its taut form. This is not gore to revel in its audacity, this is gore designed to highlight our human weakness. This isn't the "Passion of the Christ" where a single man pumps more than OPEC's daily output. This becomes a place for dying, where each victim gives their gory due, and the rest seeps out of their lifeless forms. I have never seen a movie walk this fine line so perfectly.

Only "Saving Private Ryan" ever came close, with the waves of blood on Normandy coupled with the seeping bullet-holes in a dying medic. That is the blend we find in Le Interior. The arterial spray across a hallway wall as a stunned and dying mother staggers towards nothing is the artful sublime which contrasts the explosion of meat from a head blown clear in half. And neither scene induces the guilty grin of a gore hound. They shock you. With their boldness and their brilliance, they make you stand in awe of the creators of this film. And then they go one further.

The final scene finds Sarah splayed out on the stairs. Her water broke hours ago, her amniotic sac recently exploded in a shotgun blast of crimson when her stomach was slammed with a baseball bat. A waterfall of several people's blood courses over one stair tread as the camera pans up to a woman who can not bleed much more and survive.

Gia hovers over her with her scissors. Her face is a charred mess, her own body riddled with wounds suffered this Christmas Eve. Sarah looks up at her, this woman who lost her own baby in that car wreck, and between labor-induced grunts she informs her tormentor that the baby is stuck. The Cesarean section looms once again. We are right back to their first encounter, the tip of the scissors inserted in the navel of her distended stomach. The viewer is waiting for the saving blow, the heroic rally, for the camera to pan away, for anything.

What we get instead is a rapt camera, perfectly focused, as the scissors are inserted, squeezed, and run in a line up Sarah's stomach. Snip. Snip. Snip. A cavity is opened. There is little blood because there is little left. Two hands reach inside to find the poor child, a fetus no more. The final scene is a pan up Sarah's dead carcass, the umbilical cord draped down the flight of stairs, and up over her open stomach, up to the calm rocking of Gia, cradling our little protagonist.

I can not recommend this movie highly enough. For a horror film, this is as close to perfect as you get. Hopefully you skipped right over my spoiler-filled retelling of the film to get straight to my conclusion. So here it is: 9 out of 10. After you watch it, come back and read my Cliff Notes and give us your opinion of the film.

[CPL CHUD]

Dude, this looks right up my sick and twisted alley.

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Originally Posted by CPL CHUD

Dude, this looks right up my sick and twisted alley.

I don't ever guarantee someone is going to love a film. Except right now. You WILL love this film. Every single second of it.