Few things are sexier than an art theft. This fact, and my natural penchant for parodies of the contemporary art world, made the plot of Inside (2023) sounds practically enticing: In Vasilis Katsoupis’ directorial debut, Willem Dafoe stars as Nemo, a thief whose plan to steal a multi-millionaire’s collection backfires spectacularly when he finds himself trapped in an empty Manhattan penthouse. The film seemed poised to deliver on its unspoken promise to unmask the cruel emptiness of beautiful objects, and I was ready to devour it like an expensive truffle canapé at a VIP-only museum opening. Instead, I found myself cringing InsideThe tragically forced attempt to capture the boredom of white cube galleries – a failure of the imagination that haunts so much media grounded in romanticized perceptions of the mystique of visual art.
The film begins with Nemo recalling his response when asked as a child what three things he would save from a fire: his cat, his sketchbook, and an AC/DC album. “My cat is dead, the music is fading, but the art is forever,” he tells himself in an ominous voiceover as he expertly weaves his way through the halls of the luxury apartment at the search for the prized pig from the heist, a $3 million self-portrait by Egon Schiele. He eventually gives up – the coveted room is nowhere to be found – and attempts to leave the premises, but in doing so, he triggers a malfunction in the home’s security system that traps him inside the sparingly furnished, whitewashed unit. lime. The doors are suddenly locked, his walkie-talkie buddy has jumped out, the windows are unbreakable, the faucet won’t drip, and the HVAC has gone haywire, oscillating between sub-zero and sweltering temperatures.
Nemo spends the next unbearably long 95 minutes searching for increasingly pathetic quality food and drink (soggy pasta in a bowl of water, live aquarium fish); spiral into delirium; and doodling on the walls in a style I can only describe when Raymond Pettibon meets every ten year old in a horror movie. From time to time, he absurdly pontificates and spys on the apartment building cleaner, whom he dubbed Jasmine, via a live security camera feed. But mostly, he spends what little energy he has left constructing a Babylonian tower of furniture and stacked objects in hopes of reaching the only plausible means of escape, a series of skylight panels over the absurdly high penthouse ceilings. It’s very “all work and no play makes Jack a boring boy” without the climax to justify the buildup.
What the film does succeed is its direction, largely courtesy of set designer Thorsten Sabel and curator Leonardo Bigazzi: the hell that shrouds Nemo is freezing, sparse, and expensive in a way that breathes the loneliness of being in love with things, not people. Certain artworks in the apartment, such as David Horvitz’s neon text installation ‘all the time that will come after this moment’ (2019), convey this aspirational dispassion. Others embrace the opposite sentiment, such as Brazilian painter Maxwell Alexandre’s massive canvas “Se eu fossa vocês olhava pra mim de novo” (“If I were you, I’d still be looking at myself”) (2018) from his ongoing series Pardo and Papel, glorious portraits of black individuals in moments of joy or prosperity. But alas, not a single one of these precious beauties is useful to Nemo in survival mode. At one point, he uses a small sculpture to force open a pantry door (is it art or is it functional? !), but that’s all. I know there’s a lesson here somewhere about the emptiness of the art market or the claustrophobia of exhibition spaces – I don’t care. I’m too preoccupied with more immediate, earthly concerns, such as how not a single soul heard the penthouse alarms go off.
Especially in the hands of a virtuoso like Dafoe, the character of Nemo – a man held captive by the subject of his infatuation – could have been fascinating to watch. It’s a shame that there is no story for him. The trials and tribulations our protagonist faces pile up monotonously like a list of events, never coalescing into a proper narrative. I found myself feeling the same terror as when an acquaintance at a party starts a rambling anecdote that I know won’t have a punchline. I understand Inside isn’t trying to be a traditional art heist movie, and I wasn’t expecting a car chase. But do we necessarily have to get rid of all our expectations of narration in the name of experimentation? Impossible something happen, nothing at all?
Maybe that’s the point, in which case Inside presents an unforgivable shallow view of the art world that pokes fun without being critical. In this way, the film manages to be much more pretentious than the elements of Nemo’s elegant prison – the framed little Schieles; the smart home equipped with a talking fridge that suggests a omelette with herbs; and even the line “I have a Pritzker Prize, what did you do?” ‘, which Nemo mocks with a portrait of the owner.
At one point in the agonizing home stretch, about 17 minutes before the credits roll, my partner suggested turning off the TV. I pushed back. We had already come this far, I said, citing the admittedly far-fetched possibility of a brilliant ending. “It’s called the sunk cost fallacy,” he retorted. I won’t tell you how it ends, but he was right.
