THE SELF PORTRAIT IS NOT HERE. Otherwise, the robbery is going well. Willem Dafoe broke through the penthouse, foiled the alarm, located two quite chaste but still dear Schieles. There is only one thing, however. The Self-Portrait: Dafoe can’t find it. In its place is some kind of picture book orgy bearing an uncanny resemblance to the owner of the apartment. Hurry up. The “smart house” breaks down and all the doors slam. Our hero is trapped, imprisoned, surrounded by priceless art, choice design and an eight-figure view of Manhattan.
This is the premise of Vasilis Katsoupis Inside: A burglary gone wrong leaves a thief stranded in an ultra-luxury unit with a slim hope of rescue and a woefully understocked fridge. It’s presented as a survival film, as an urban film Castaway (2000) or a revival of Dafoe’s brilliant and perverse madness in Robert Eggers Lighthouse (2019), with a touch of class warfare in tune with the times. He defecates in the home spa and makes tropical fish meatballs. Is he some unfortunate Robin Hood, trying to free these masterpieces from this rich man’s sepulchre? Maybe, but it’s also clearly personal. He seems to know the owner from a past life, and you quickly get the impression that “inside” doesn’t just mean inside or in jail, but inside work.
The real thrill of this caper is watching Willem Dafoe fill a hundred minutes of screen time with his singular, springy body. Indeed, aside from a few odd flashbacks or hallucinations of a vernissage and a cleaning lady he crawls on security cameras, it’s all Dafoe, all the time. There’s one particularly special moment that few other actors could have made interesting: our thief is so low on water that he decides to lick the frost off the freezer shelves. We are treated to a long bird’s eye view of his delighted pleasure, the sight of a completely alone and uninhibited man framed like a portrait, a white plastic frame within a frame.
He still can’t find the self-portrait. What could that mean? Inside is an allegory in the vein of grandiose authorial visions like that of Darren Aronofsky Mother (2017) and Julia Ducournau Titanium (2021), two films in which the “father” turns out to be God. The god of Inside isn’t all that present—more of a quiet Catholic type than a gossipy evangelical deity—but the Pritzker Prize-winning architect who owns and possibly built the condo is a solid contender. Symbolism abounds. There’s the descent into the HVAC Inferno where, marking the film’s first and second acts, the crank computer begins roasting Dafoe alive before attempting to freeze him. There is his desperate attempt to call for help by triggering the sprinkler system – the deluge is coming, everything is soaked, but the architect’s slab is so tight that the supervisor does not notice it. A pigeon slowly dies on the porch, showing the passage of time.
Art, too, is full of tedious symbols. The director hired Leonardo Bigazzi, a curator who often consults on films, to decorate the thief’s golden cage. In the outright absence of God, the artwork on the wall acts as Dafoe’s castigators. Some are a little on the nose, like Maurizio Cattelan’s C-print of a Milanese gallerist taped to the wall, or a neon sign by David Horvitz that says: “All the time that will come after this moment”. Others are alluring, like a Superstudio print of the continuous Monument spanning New York, or Francesco Clemente’s watercolor of bare light splitting into a rainbow that the camera lingers on throughout the film. (A rainbow? Well, I guess East a biblical symbol!)
And yes, the self-portrait. Dafoe finds him, months after the heist, after opening a cupboard to discover a dark, absinthe-stained panic room. There is also what looks like an original illuminated copy of William Blake Marriage of heaven and hell-placed on the chest of a scary sculpture of the architect as a corpse. Dafoe, whose previous roles include both Jesus and Satan, paraphrase Blake here: “Man has no body distinct from the soul. Energy is the only life and comes from the body. Energy is an eternal delight. The body is the soul’s self-portrait.
We know from a labored voiceover that Dafoe’s character is an artist, from an early age. In the first act, he settles down enough to make some sketches of the governess. In the last act, he regresses to wall drawings, wild charcoal spirals; assembly of steel nuts, mats and waste. He is emaciated and hungry and lives in a mystical level of misery. His latest bet is to assemble a stack of modernist furniture with strips of upholstery and climb that Babel up to a massive skylight, an inverted stepped pyramid that gleams in the sunlight. The final shot of the film shows the destroyed, empty room and the skylight with its lower panel missing. Did he escape? Is he dead? In a film with such faith in uncertainty, either outcome would be a continuity error.
Even contractually trapped in a corny allegory of the art world of heaven and hell, Saint Willem can do no wrong. His character is supposed to find redemption in art, but it’s really her art, the severe cathedral of his acting talent, which redeems We, prisoners of an indulgent film. Dafoe played van Gogh in the 2018 film Julian Schnabel, but Inside also remembers his small role in another biopic directed by Schnabel, in 1996 Basquiatwhere he descends from a ladder and enters the shot to tell Jean-Michel that he is not just a handyman, he is also an artist.
Inside opens in US theaters on March 10.
