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‘inside’ review: willem dafoe adds another tortured soul to his portrait gallery in a suffocating intellectual exercise.

Greek director Vasilis Katsoupis’ first dramatic feature is a high-concept thriller about a master art thief trapped in a luxury New York penthouse that turns on him.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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But Inside might represent a new extreme, trapping the actor alone onscreen for the duration — aside from one or two brief dream detours — to wrestle with the technology of a mutinous luxury smart home and, most of all, with himself. That will make this March release from Focus a tough sell, especially since it feels less like a story than an agonized fever dream, or one of those endurance art installations, like Tilda Swinton snoozing in a glass box at MoMA.

Dafoe plays an art thief named Nemo who breaks into the sprawling Manhattan penthouse of an unidentified one-percenter with the specific task of removing some prized portraits by Egon Schiele, valued at a cool $3 million. But before he can slip away, the security system malfunctions and he’s stuck there, abandoned by his accomplice on the outside. Turns out the apartment is designed to make escape just as difficult as forced entry.

In voiceover at the start of the film, Nemo recalls being asked as a child which three things would he save if his house was on fire. While his classmates at school dutifully listed family members, he boiled it down to an AC/DC CD, his cat and his sketchbooks. On subsequent reflection he discovered, “Cats die, music fades, but art is for keeps.”

That’s a pretty bleak summation to leave an audience with after almost two hours of grueling imprisonment set to a brooding ambient score. But Katsoupis and his screenwriter Ben Hopkins are not interested in rewarding our patience with revelations any more than they are in providing an unambiguous ending. This is a movie that aims to ponder big questions of physical and spiritual survival, of the resilience of the soul, the primacy of energy as it’s steadily drained from the protagonist.

Inside is also, it has to be said, a bit of a masturbatory exercise, of the type that’s irresistible to a brainy actor’s actor like Dafoe. The full-tilt commitment of his performance as Nemo spirals into madness is aided by the imagination of Katsoupis and Hopkins, continually throwing new challenges at him as his confinement stretches on and it becomes clear that no one is coming to liberate or arrest him.

That includes the same kind of elemental hardships that beset the characters in outdoor survival stories as the water is shut off and the air-conditioning system goes haywire, cranking the temperature up over 100 degrees and then down to a teeth-chattering chill. And just as Tom Hanks had the volleyball Wilson for company in Cast Away , Nemo has a wounded pigeon grounded on the terrace just beyond the unbreakable glass doors.

But the movie’s high concept becomes steadily more limiting — eventually almost as exhausting for the audience as it is for Nemo. His imagined interactions with the building concierge, residents or especially a cleaner that he observes daily on the closed-circuit monitors do little to shake up the static nature of the thrill-deprived thriller.

Nor do his fantasy interludes or his windy pontifications about visual art, sparked by the striking collection of contemporary work on display throughout the penthouse, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi. Ultimately, those art pieces seem to both mirror and mock Nemo’s psychological deterioration, just as the smart home technology has been doing.

Production designer Thorsten Sabel’s apartment is a visual knockout, a deluxe serve of Architectural Digest porn that dazzles with its opulent austerity and then visibly hardens into a cold, unaccommodating citadel of capitalist privilege, in which the intruder must pay with his sanity.

The director’s work can’t be faulted for its rigorousness, and as a tightly packaged COVID construct, this is more inventive than most. But even the formidable Dafoe at his most intense ultimately can’t stop Inside from succumbing to its own narrowness, devolving into a self-reflexive portrait of soul-sucking isolation.

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• Review: Willem Dafoe Is an Art Thief Confronting a Long Night of the Soul in <i>Inside</i>

Review: Willem Dafoe Is an Art Thief Confronting a Long Night of the Soul in Inside

I t’s a wonder we didn’t all go mad. How did we even survive the early days of the pandemic, a seemingly interminable epoch during which many of us spent long hours holed up in our sad little towers, captives in sweatpants gazing longingly at the outside world? Vasilis Katsoupis’ intriguingly odd little psychological thriller Inside isn’t a pandemic parable per se, but it’s likely to resurrect some jittery memories of those days even so. A high-end art thief played by Willem Dafoe botches a burglary and finds himself trapped alone in an art-filled luxury penthouse, for hours that stretch into days. Will he get out, and if so, how? Meanwhile, what is all that time spent alone—not to mention all that art, which includes an elegantly haunting Egon Schiele self-portrait—doing to his brain?

There’s a lot going on in this captivating, buzzingly cerebral picture. Written by Ben Hopkins, from an idea by Katsoupis, Inside is partly a black comedy about enforced solitude. But it’s also about the ways art can sustain us even as it may incite feelings we’d rather not deal with, and it tangles with the messy process of creating art in the first place: for some, that creation is a compulsion, almost a prison break of the mind, a way to make sense of the entropy of the human psyche.

Inside is essentially a one-man extravaganza for Dafoe, and he shoulders its complexities ably, with zero vanity. At the film’s beginning, Dafoe’s Nemo is a confident heist-master, disabling alarm systems with ease and freeing priceless pictures from the wall with a magician’s deftness. The penthouse’s zillionaire owner is in Kazakhstan for an unknown length of time, and he’s set up complex technology to babysit his possessions while he’s gone. None of this circuitry intimidates Nemo; he’s studied it like a master.

Until it all goes haywire, and Nemo finds himself locked inside a luxury pad turned sinister. The temperature controls zig and zag with a mind of their own, leaving him sweating one minute and shivering the next. There’s no running water. To amuse himself, Nemo contemplates the paintings and sculptures around him. (They include works from artists like Francesco Clemente, some specially commissioned for the film.) Before long, his response to his confinement becomes a work of art itself, one whose creation drives him into a semiferal state. Dafoe is alive to every shift: When he strips down, his bony shoulders have a temple-like austerity. When he sweats, every pore seems alert. Some of these descent-into-madness transitions may not be easy to watch, but they’re never, ever boring.

Inside is magnetic precisely because it doesn’t hand over easy answers. It can feel arty and arch, a bit taken with its own somber cleverness. And then Katsoupis pulls off a hilarious little curlicue, like an interlude in which Nemo performs a cooking-show routine for an audience of no one. His meal of choice is pasta selected from the apartment’s ever waning pantry staples, soaked overnight in cold water. He goes through the preparation steps, all two of them, with the affability of Ina Garten.

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Even that little bit of pasta water is a precious commodity: it comes from a timed sprinkler that’s been set up to hydrate one of the apartment’s key features, a small, lush indoor forest. Nemo waits and waits to hear the hiss of that sprinkler, and when it finally comes, he flops down in this mini Eden and cackles with joy amid the glittering spray. It’s a moment of heaven in a peculiar kind of hell. Leave it to Dafoe to make the most of every drop.

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Inside review: Being stuck in a room with Willem Dafoe is pretty thrilling

Dafoe plays an art thief trapped in a high-tech manhattan apartment in this cunning, immersive art world critique.

With his acerbic eyes on the brink of mischief, and a knowing smile that often suggests something a little darker than meets the eye, Willem Dafoe, the star of The Last Temptation Of The Christ and At Eternity’s Gate , is among cinema’s great burdened souls. For Inside , Dafoe puts to work every angular muscle and wrinkle of his visage to unnerving effect. He’s the perfect lead for writer-director Vasilis Katsoupis’ resourceful and immersive survival tale, one that puts a gradually tortured protagonist through the wringer in unimaginable ways.

In fact, Dafoe is pretty much the only character in this unexpectedly thrilling psychodrama, save for a maid that his character sees through the intercom of the luxury high-rise apartment he’s stuck in, and a poor pigeon with a grim fate as wretched as his. It all starts when Nemo (Dafoe), an agile and crafty art thief, swiftly enters the coldly chic and high-tech midtown Manhattan penthouse in question, home to a well-heeled artist with an impressive collection of artwork, from Egon Schiele to Francesco Clemente.

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The drill is simple enough: Nemo needs to move quickly through the sparsely decorated, ultra-sophisticated space and collect the priceless works of art (authentic works gathered for the film by curator Leonardo Bigazzi) with the help of a voice on the other end of his walkie-talkie he calls Number 3. But when the apartment’s seemingly unbreakable security system malfunctions on Nemo’s way out, all possible avenues of exit are shut down and Number 3 vanishes, leaving Nemo abandoned inside an unfriendly space that’s unwilling to provide for his basic needs like food, water, and livable temperature levels.

While it’s a bit of a cliché to refer to a film location as a character in its own right, doing so for Inside is perhaps the only way to do justice to the level of heavy-lifting done by Thorsten Sabel’s ingenious production design in telling this story. Indeed, every part of the penthouse where the entirety of Inside unfolds is a tool in Ben Hopkins’ script (which was developed from an idea by Katsoupis). Broadly speaking, their joint effort resembles an escape room challenge or, more accurately, a quiet (and sometimes humorous) survival saga like All Is Lost where wealth and luxury (instead of mother nature) are the perilous sources of a hostile environment containing scores of priceless art that are as useful to Nemo as wads of cash would be to Robinson Crusoe on a desert island.

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Still, that Nemo is an artist—at least twice, his voiceover tells us that his sketchbook is among his most-prized possessions—comes in handy to the lonesome fighter. Throughout Inside , he operates like an engineer-cum-installation artist, capable of building a makeshift escape ladder to the skylight of the apartment’s impossibly high ceilings. Before that, he carves a hole in a handsomely ornate wood door frame only to (expectedly) hit its steely foundation. Then he eliminates other escape options like trying to be heard or seen as he comes to realize that the wealth he’s encased in has made him inaccessible—as the owner of the space intended. So he breaks, destroys, unscrews, and mounts the furniture available to him, hoping to climb out of his spacious prison that gradually malfunctions with extreme hot and cold temperatures. To make matters worse, he has no water except for a timed indoor sprinkler and no food to speak of other than a few cans of innutritious food and some crackers.

Throughout this one-location nail-biter, you can unambiguously see the collaboration between Katsoupis, Hopkins and Sabel expanding the story’s scope in ways both economical and smart and with the backdrop of a distancing and icy Brutalist aesthetic. Also noteworthy is Bigazzi’s cohesiveness—the artworks he’s selected (especially a family photograph) focus on the eyes, creating a collectively spine-tingling sense that Nemo is constantly being watched from within.

As with most works of art, the message of Inside is in the eye of the beholder. It’s possible to read this original exercise as a critique of extreme wealth and pretentiousness in the art world, neither of which can nourish one’s body or save a human from their eventual demise. It’s also possible to get overwhelmed, bored or feel unmoved by the repetitiveness of it all as time and seasons pass, Nemo’s feces accumulates and the once stonily elegant flat becomes uninhabitable. This critic firmly leans towards the former reading—it is in fact admirable that Katsoupis leaves Inside open-ended without getting heavy-handed or preachy. Still, the greatest asset of the picture is Dafoe’s finesse in a part that’s both physically demanding and fiendishly fun to witness. It’s like someone dropped him in the middle of an antique shop with a baseball bat and said, “Go to town!” And that he does.

( Inside opens in theaters March 17)

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‘Inside’ Review: Willem Dafoe Is Riveting as a Thief Stuck Alone in a Gilded Cage

Director Vasilis Katsoupis concocts a clever premise and grand role for his star, but the story doesn’t have staying power.

By Murtada Elfadl

Murtada Elfadl

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Willem Dafoe defies classification. He appears in blockbusters and arthouse films, in lead roles or as part of an ensemble. What can be counted on is that he’ll add a dash of idiosyncratic malevolence to whatever part he’s playing. Whether he’s playing Christ, Antichrist or somewhere in between, there’s always something slightly off that makes him watchable. In “ Inside ,” director Vasilis Katsoupis provides him with a showcase part in what is essentially a one-man show that Dafoe carries with aplomb.

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Dafoe’s an inventive and agile character actor, handsome and appealing but also possessing distinctive malleable features. All this makes him perfect for this one-man show, as he’s never less than immensely watchable. He’s called upon to telegraph Nemo’s emotional state through his body. Images of his back and hunched shoulders fill the frame. He’s shown on the floor in the fetus position and the camera patiently closes up on the creases of his neck and hands. His body becomes a canvas for the filmmakers to convey not just the loneliness of the character but also the unnecessariness of collecting art as possessions. All these beautiful pieces cannot sustain Nemo in any way.

Halfway into a mostly silent performance, Nemo playacts as if he’s a cook in a TV show. His solitary existence drives him to talk back to the security footage on the TV. What a welcome relief to hear Dafoe’s voice and see him animated with emotion. Finally he gets to do something other than the silent poses he has been doing for most of the running time. In so doing, “Inside” reveals what’s been absent all along.

With this premise, there’s ultimately no place to go. As the story unfolds, the audience feels as stuck as Nemo, with no escape in sight. The film has exhausted both the premise and its leading man’s capabilities, while the audience has grown tired of pondering whatever themes it purports to examine. It’s time to part ways, and yet the images keep flickering on screen and the film keeps going. “Inside” has an intriguing premise and an actor who makes whatever’s thrown at him intriguingly watchable. What it lacks is sufficient sense of who this character is, and a resonant enough narrative to justify being locked up together.

Reviewed online, March 15, 2023. In Berlin Film Festival. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 105 MIN.

• Production: (U.K.-Germany-Belgium-Switzerland-Greece) A Focus Features release, presented in association with Film-Und Medienstiftung, NRW, Eurimages, Greek Film Center, Screen Flanders, MFG Baden-Würtemberg, German Federal Film Fund, Bord Cadre Films, Sovereign Films, Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media of a Heretic, Schiwgo Film, A Private View production, in co-production with BNP Paribas, Fortis Film Finance, ERT, MMC Movies. Producers: Giorgos Karnavas, Marcos Kantis, Dries Phlypo. Executive producers: Jim Stark, Vasilis Katsoupis, Konstantinos Kontovrakis, Charles E. Breitkreuz, Martin Lehwald, Jean-Claude, Van Rijckeghem, Stephen Kelliher.
• Crew: Director: Vasilis Katsoupis. Writer: Ben Hopkins. Camera: Steven Annis. Production Designer: Thorsten Sabel. Art Curator: Leonardo Bigazzi. Editor: Lambis Haralambidis.
• With: Willem Dafoe.

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The Thief as Artist in “Inside”

The hero of “Inside,” a new film directed by Vasilis Katsoupis, is apparently called Nemo, though I never caught the name. All I know is that he’s a thief, and that he’s played by Willem Dafoe . As the story commences, a helicopter deposits Nemo onto the roof of a tall building in New York. From the fact that the chopper is heard but not seen, you will gather that “Inside” is not blessed with an inexhaustible budget. Here is an art-house flick, cunningly coated in the gleam of a high-tech thriller.

And what an art house. Nemo breaks into a top-floor apartment, which looks more like a gallery than a home. It belongs to a man of evident wealth and slightly uncertain taste, who is away in Kazakhstan. Hanging on the walls—or, in the case of video installations, projected onto screens—are multiple works of modern art, mostly of recent vintage. The oldest are by Egon Schiele , and it is these that Nemo has come to steal, presumably so that they can be passed on to another Croesus. Swift and feline, Nemo gathers all but one of the Schieles and prepares to depart, whereupon the security system locks the doors and shuts him in. He must spend the rest of the film alone, aloft, unmissed, and unlamented. Think Rapunzel without the hair.

It’s not hard to spot the wily ways in which Katsoupis and his screenwriter, Ben Hopkins, rig the plot. The gas and the water have been switched off in the apartment, meaning that Nemo can’t cook any food or flush the toilet. The electricity, on the other hand, remains on, so he is able to admire a glowing blue neon sign—another piece of art—that reads “all the time that will come after this moment.” The fridge, too, is in use: there’s an amazing shot of Nemo, parched and desperate, inserting his head into the icebox and licking the chilly moisture from the sides. Oh, and the phone that connects him to the lobby of the building is out of order. Of course it is.

All of which suggests that “Inside” belongs with “ Castaway ” (2000), “The Martian” (2015), and other tales of solitary survival. Although Nemo is in the lap of luxury, snacking on truffle sauce and caviar from the fridge, the apartment is as imprisoning as Mars, and, being a resourceful fellow, he is determined to abscond. The only possible exit is a skylight, and the only means of reaching it is to build a tower from a bedstead and other bits of furniture. Standing atop his structure and chipping away at plaster, he needs something to protect his eyes, so he smashes a purple glass vase, picks out two curved shards, and binds them together with fabric. Voilà: a pair of makeshift goggles. The look is part handyman, part demon. Very cool, and very Dafoe.

What distinguishes Nemo from earlier Crusoes is that he’s not just an escape artist but an actual artist. In voice-over, he tells us that, as a child, he valued his sketchbooks above all else; now, in his compulsory lockdown, he begins to draw. Graphite sprinkles onto the floor, so he scoops it up, swishes it around his mouth, and spits on the wall, making a black splash—oral Action painting, you might say. Also, as if his tower had not sated his yen for construction, he conjures a sculpture of found materials: a form of altar, crowned with soft cushions and metal nuts. But who is worshipping whom? What’s going on?

Well, the movie is morphing. Much of it, in the first half, is funny, deft, and dotted with suspense. If the door of the fridge is left open, for example, the Macarena starts to play. (Nemo, initially vexed by this, gives in and dances along.) A young woman (Eliza Stuyck) employed as a cleaner in the building is oblivious of Nemo’s presence, yet he can observe her on CCTV. He names her Jasmine, and, at one lovely point, he watches her enjoying a quick cigarette and vacuuming the smoke from the air. Gradually, however, “Inside” grows heavy. The tread of the story slows; dream sequences intrude, to no effect; Nemo turns inward, courting madness; and we realize that Katsoupis is positioning his film as an exercise in performance art, to match the video installations and the other works. Notice the photograph of a man attached to a wall with duct tape. That is an untitled image by the waggish Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan , from 1999, and the poor guy being displayed, with a heretical hint of crucifixion, is a gallery owner from Milan—a kindred spirit for Nemo, who is equally stuck.

To a degree, this creative scheme makes sense. It certainly tallies with the singular career of Dafoe, whom we saw as the thieving Caravaggio, an Allied agent with missing thumbs, in “The English Patient” (1996); as van Gogh, in “At Eternity’s Gate” (2018); and, long ago, in “To Live and Die in L.A.” (1985), as a snaky villain and artist who sets fire to one of his own paintings, the better to concentrate on his skills as a master forger. The face is more graven these days, but the gnashing grin and the wry tone of his delivery are unchanged, as is Dafoe’s knack for wrong-footing us; his wicked characters are as hard to dislike as his virtuous ones are to trust. We instinctively believe in him as a maker of things, and “Inside” would have been implausible, or unbearable, with any other actor in the role. Life, in the hands of Dafoe, is an agonized game.

For Katsoupis, regrettably, agony wins the day. To furnish a movie with cultural props, however lavish, is not to confer an automatic gravity and heft; witness Nemo inching into a hidden passageway and discovering not just a Schiele self-portrait, from 1910, but an original copy of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” by William Blake, which Nemo then studies and recites. (The Blake is quite a coup, since only nine copies are known to exist.) Do the shenanigans of “Inside” keep honest company with such treasures? Should we bracket Dafoe, compellingly wiry as he is, with the acutely angled stiffness of the Schiele picture—the “enigmatic substances I am made of,” as the artist wrote in 1911? Not really. Give me the sharp wit of the movie’s early scenes, which are far more disrespectful: the enigma-free sight of Nemo, for instance, trying to crunch through a door and deploying “Paper Hat,” a bronze sculpture by Lynn Chadwick, as a crowbar . Who said art is no use?

Two ways to win the Cold War. Option one: a first strike, annihilating the Communist bloc’s arsenal of nuclear weapons before they can be launched in retaliation. Option two, no less fraught with risk: send nine white guys, including four horn players and a singer with a penchant for leather pants, to perform Grammy-winning rock and roll behind the Iron Curtain. It is this second course of action that was pursued in 1970, and that is investigated in a knotty new documentary, “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?”

Nobody would have asked that question in 1969, when “Blood, Sweat & Tears,” the second album by the group of the same name, was enthroned for weeks at the top of the charts. It’s a witches’ brew, kicking off with a riff on Erik Satie and marked by salvos of brass and mid-song shifts in tempo, but the director of the documentary, John Scheinfeld, doesn’t dive very deep into the music. Although he has made films about John Coltrane, John Lennon, and Harry Nilsson, what grips him here, understandably, is the particular summer when Blood, Sweat & Tears went on tour to Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland. It was a revelation, and a fall from grace.

Why did they go? Blackmail, of a sort. The lead vocalist, a Canadian named David Clayton-Thomas, had a voice of tremendous rasp and rumble. He sounded like a volcano making conversation. He was also in danger of losing his green card, and, to avoid that fate, the band’s manager struck a dark deal with the U.S. State Department, which wanted American performers who could spread the word, or the groove, behind enemy lines. So the band was dispatched to hot spots such as Zagreb (where the audience was sullenly unresponsive) and Warsaw (the opposite). Scariest of all was Bucharest, where the concert was officially deemed “too successful,” where cops with German shepherds were on hand to quash the crowd’s delight, where one enthusiast was taken away and beaten for requesting an autograph, and where “people don’t enjoy the privilege of spontaneous outburst,” as Clayton-Thomas reported, back in L.A. He added, “It’s given us all a new appreciation of various freedoms that we took for granted.”

That was true, but it was an unforgivable truth—anathema to those in the counterculture for whom America held a monopoly on repression. Blood, Sweat & Tears were reviled in the press as a “fascist rock band” in the making, and as “pig-collaborators” by Abbie Hoffman, who never had the pleasure of protesting in Bucharest. More than it knows, this movie is an engaging, and sometimes enraging, exposé of chronic insularity. (I suggest viewing it as an ironic footnote, or a bonus track, to “The Free World,” a consummate study of the period by my colleague Louis Menand.) One of the group’s biggest hits, “And When I Die,” contains the line “All I ask of living is to have no chains on me.” Look closely at the footage of the Romanian fans, at a gig, and you will see a pair of hands raised high in celebration. They are joined together by a chain. ♦

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Inside Review

Willem dafoe can’t save this scattered one-location thriller..

With an intriguing set up, Vasilis Katsoupis’ Inside features a captivating performance by Willem Dafoe as an art thief trapped in a billionaire’s penthouse. However, its unfocused use of space, plot, and theme render it mostly dull until it eventually peters out instead of offering any kind of discernible ending, let alone a cathartic one. Whatever it hopes to say about the meaning of art and materialism it says in scattered spurts which rarely add up to a satisfying whole. It approaches its one-location survival story much the same way, leading to similar results.

Set in a New York skyrise, Inside casts Dafoe as Nemo, one member of an otherwise-unseen heist crew, and a character whose opening voiceover hints at his undying love of paintings. This gives him something of a personal connection, at least in theory, to the numerous works of art he’s been sent to steal, when – with help of his cohorts over walkie talkies – he breaks into an enormous luxury apartment while its haughty owner is overseas for several months. Things go awry, and Nemo is unable to either exit the penthouse or call for help, leaving him trapped in a high-tech prison that slowly begins to fail him.

Katsoupis and screenwriter Ben Hopkins are adept at setting up physical hurdles, just as Dafoe is stellar at portraying subtle annoyance that eventually turns into desperation the longer he’s indoors. Food and water are limited, and Nemo must contend with the absurdity of “ Macarena ” blaring over loudspeakers each time he opens the scantly stocked refrigerator – one of just a few effective comedic gags.

However, once Inside lays its roadmap of potential hurdles, from dwindling supplies and broken plumbing to a thermostat on the fritz, it rarely returns its focus to any of these issues as continued problems. Instead, the edit (by Lambis Haralambidis) treats them merely as tidbits of information – the kind which you might recall and wonder about once they’ve been off-screen for lengthy periods – rather than as evolving elements of Nemo’s confining environment. Inside’s structure is almost too mechanical to leave a lasting impact; dramatic hurdles, like a lack of proper toilet facilities or dental hygiene, are set up clearly, but Inside’s idea of “payoff” simply means a single shot to get us up to speed on these problems once time has passed. It has little sense of continuity in between, rendering it less of an ongoing story and more of a checklist.

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The passage of time in Inside is yet another oddity. While it’s unclear just how long Nemo spends in this apartment – the seasons change enough outside the window that it’s conceivably several months – there’s little care for what time actually feels like for its protagonist, and how it stretches or contracts from his point of view. It’s simply another logistical screenplay element unfolding in the background rather than something experienced through human eyes, or through its toll on the human form. Dafoe’s performance is physically painstaking and emotionally introspective as Nemo is driven further into isolation. However, few filmmaking elements complement his work.

It’s hard not to think of Inside as a pandemic lockdown movie in spirit, one meant to reflect familiar frustrations and feelings of isolation; Nemo even finds comfort in people-watching, by tuning into live security footage of people all around the building. However, cinematographer Steve Annis’ camera rarely works in tandem with the space to enhance Nemo’s emotions or his physical experience. The penthouse seldom feels uncomfortable; it’s shot neither claustrophobically, like its walls are closing in, nor like its emptiness is truly vast.

Inside Photos

The soundscape does, on occasion, enhance the idea that Nemo might slowly be losing his mind, but Katsoupis and Hopkins’ conception of this idea never comes to fruition beyond fleeting phantasmagorical imagery. We see the outside effects, but we’re never allowed a window into Nemo’s psychology; we see the “what” of his fractured visions, but Inside is rarely concerned with presenting them in a manner that suggests a “why.” Dafoe’s frequent voiceover (and even his spoken lines, to no one in particular) often hints at scattered thoughts about modern art, both as status symbols and things which people may hold personally dear. In fact, one of the paintings Nemo is sent to steal happens to be an expensive self-portrait, which inherently rides the lines between these two outlooks. However, this tension never comes to the fore, no matter how long Nemo spends watching and considering the art around him – or creating his own, whether in the form of ritual as he slips into a more primal existence, or by repurposing furniture to build enormous structures in the hopes of reaching a vent in the ceiling.

Despite having numerous paintings and sculptures scattered across its space, and despite its character frequently alluding to deeper artistic thoughts and feelings, Inside has little to no perspective on modern art. And yet, it spends so much of its 105-minute runtime ruminating on the subject that it leaves little room to establish the urgency of Nemo’s situation the further it goes on.

It may recall other films which are similar in concept, like Danny Boyle’s wilderness-survival drama 127 Hours, or more pertinently, Vikramaditya Motwane’s Trapped, a 2017 Indian thriller also featuring a character stuck in a high-rise apartment. But these comparisons feel almost unfair, since both Boyle and Motwane quickly and effectively establish a balance between the characters themselves and the stakes of their respective situations. Katsoupis, in contrast, struggles to visually string together the handful of ideas that make up Hopkins’ already scattered screenplay, yielding a story that buckles under the weight of its faux-profound ending, which not only lacks momentum, but meaning. The result is a film that you could narrate or re-edit in practically any order, but no matter what, it would be just as plain.

Despite Willem Dafoe’s powerful acting work as an art thief trapped in a luxurious penthouse, Inside offers little by way of insight into its main character, his surroundings, or the scenario in which he finds himself. It features several interesting ideas – in theory, at least – about art and the material world, but no two of them are strung together with anything resulting in intriguing imagery, propulsive stakes, or meaningful human drama.

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Inside review: a dour, ill-conceived psychological drama

“Inside is an ambitious but ultimately ineffective psychological drama.”

• Willem Dafoe's go-for-broke solo performance
• An effectively disorienting pace
• A meandering, overlong story
• A disappointing lack of tension throughout
• A lackluster conclusion

Inside is a thoroughly unpleasant film. That isn’t a bug so much as it is a feature, though. The film, which comes from director Vasilis Katsoupis and writer Ben Hopkins, is a self-contained descent into the mind of one man who finds himself trapped in the most absurdly suffocating, bourgeoisie of settings. Despite what its trailers might have you believe, Inside isn’t much of a thriller, either. The film is, instead, a test of not only its character’s patience, but also the audience’s. For nearly two hours, Katsoupis and Hopkins ask you to sit by and watch as one trapped art thief is forced to lower himself to his most animalistic standards in order to survive.

Inside is, in other words, a cinematic endurance test. Its displays of filth and madness grow over the course of its story until they reach such absurd lows that they’ll have you questioning what the point of any of it was in the first place. Unfortunately, Inside fails to offer a satisfying answer to that question. In fact, outside of the commendable, go-for-broke performance at the center of it, there’s not much about Inside that’s worth recommending. The film is ultimately just as shallow as the ankle-high pond that sits at the center of the New York City penthouse apartment where Inside ’s story unfolds.

The film, to either its credit or its fault, tries to keep the surface-level depth of its story hidden for as long as possible. The drama’s opening minutes set it up to be the kind of bare-bones, but efficient heist-gone-wrong thriller that it most definitely is not. Over the course of its prologue, viewers watch as the film’s central art thief, Nemo (Willem Dafoe), infiltrates a high-security NYC penthouse owned by a renowned artist and begins looting some of the paintings and sculptures that are scattered throughout the apartment.

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Everything goes wrong when a system malfunction triggers the apartment’s highest security measures, which not only seal Dafoe’s Nemo inside behind impenetrable steel doors and bulletproof glass windows, but also shut off the penthouse’s electricity and plumbing. Abandoned by his fellow heist members, Nemo quickly begins to realize that his out-of-town mark’s apartment has now become the prison he may very well die in. From that point on, Nemo’s desperation to survive only continues to grow until he’s willing to not only eat dog food, but also scale dangerously high stacks of rearranged furniture on the slim chance that they might lead him to freedom.

The places Inside eventually goes aren’t nearly as interesting as its first act suggests. That fact doesn’t take away from how genuinely effective the first 20 minutes or so of Inside are. After throwing the film’s initial heist premise out the window, Katsoupis and Hopkins spend Inside ‘s opening minutes stacking problem upon problem on Dafoe’s Nemo until the sense of dread created by his seemingly inescapable situation has become overwhelming. The early moments where Nemo successfully disables his new prison’s blaring alarms and figures out how to take full advantage of its miniature garden’s sprinkler system also set Inside up to be a Man Escaped -esque, Robert Bresson-inspired minimalist thriller.

It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that Inside ultimately doesn’t end up going that route. Instead, the film spends most of its second and third acts pursuing surreal detours and lingering on moments of quiet, increasingly dull madness. At first, the latter scenes, including one where Dafoe’s Nemo decides to tell a joke to an entire imaginary crowd of listeners, hit with a considerable level of startling sharpness. By the time Nemo’s puppeteering chairs and singing the same songs over and over again to himself, though, the film has lost so much tension that even Dafoe’s biggest moments of crazed desperation end up feeling more superfluous than shocking or unnerving.

Rather than maintaining a constant strain of tension, Inside becomes so wrapped up in wallowing in the misery of its protagonist’s situation that any sense of urgency or suspense has utterly disintegrated by the time the film has reached its halfway point. While  Inside  tosses in more than a few moments of surreal fantasy throughout its runtime as well, very few of them actually land with any real weight. Behind the camera, Katsoupis’ visual style feels so suffocatingly controlled that it prevents Inside from ever truly reaching the kind of surreal, dreamlike heights that it so desperately aims for.

Of the film’s surreal sequences, the only one that leaves much of a lasting impression sees Dafoe’s Nemo briefly fantasize about a maid (Eliza Stuyck) he’s watched through a set of security cameras make her way into his penthouse prison and share a moment of restrained intimacy with him. Katsoupis’ camera cuts extremely close to Dafoe’s lips and cheeks throughout the scene, and Steve Annis’ cinematography lovingly captures the moments when Stuyck’s maid traces her lips and fingers along Nemo’s face without ever actually touching him.

The scene is one of the only moments where Inside feels locked into its protagonist’s emotions and loneliness. For the rest of its runtime, Inside feels far too preoccupied with maintaining a cold, omniscient perspective. While it briefly feints toward interesting ideas about the way in which wealth and art have become toxically linked in the 21st century as well, Inside never pursues any of its various ideas deeply enough for them to feel fully baked or thought-provoking. The fact that the film’s story concludes with a series of suggestive images rather than a dose of concrete catharsis (or even dark humor) only makes it that much more clear just how badly Katsoupis has gauged what moviegoers may actually want from Inside ’s story.

It’s the tragic irony at the heart of Inside that, much like its protagonist, the film never really ends up going anywhere.

Inside is now playing in theaters.

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Common Sense Media Review

One-man escape/survival movie has blood, sex, swearing.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Inside is a thriller about an art thief (Willem Dafoe) who gets trapped in a penthouse during a job. It's equal parts survival/escape thriller and existential parable, and while many viewers will enjoy its aesthetic and its puzzles, it's not for everyone. There's some violence,…

Why Age 15+?

Several uses of "f--k," plus "ass," "damn," "hell," "oh God."

Character accidentally cuts hand with knife. Fall from high place. Injury. Minor

Explicit female nudity and graphic sex acts depicted in paintings. Character bri

Character drinks various wines and liquors throughout. Character on security cam

Any Positive Content?

It's hard to say exactly what this movie is really about; the ending is ambiguou

The main character shows some impressive carpentry skills, using found objects i

The main character is a White man; very few other people are seen in the movie.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Character accidentally cuts hand with knife. Fall from high place. Injury. Minor bloody wounds. Character does something to teeth/lip at bathroom sink; he starts bleeding, and blood drips on the floor. Hallucination includes a character's head being bashed on a bathroom sink. Character is shocked by what seems to be a dead body, but it's fake (an art installment). An injured pigeon dies outside the window; the bird's body deteriorates, and maggots are shown. Character kills pet fish for food; they're seen gulping for oxygen on countertop.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Explicit female nudity and graphic sex acts depicted in paintings. Character briefly watches scrambled pornography on TV (audio heard). Main character wears only underwear. Character hallucinates that a woman is with him; she comes close and lingers, as if to kiss him, but she never does.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Character drinks various wines and liquors throughout. Character on security camera smokes cigarettes several times.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

It's hard to say exactly what this movie is really about; the ending is ambiguous. Wealth and inequality could be themes, given the contrast of the character and his opulent surroundings. But perhaps the most likely theme is one about the true nature of art. Can art exist anywhere, or does it have to be in a certain form?

Positive Role Models

The main character shows some impressive carpentry skills, using found objects in the penthouse to make the tools that he needs to try to escape. He may inspire some viewers to brush up on similar life-saving skills, but on the whole it comes down to the fact that he's a thief, and everything he does is for himself. We don't know much about him, and he has no real redemption or consequences.

Diverse Representations

The main character is a White man; very few other people are seen in the movie. Another White man appears in a dream/hallucination. Perhaps the second most important character is a woman housekeeper (Belgian actor Eliza Stuyck). She's seen in security camera images and in a hallucination, though viewers never hear her speak. Some of her co-workers, also seen in security camera images, are coded as Latino.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that Inside is a thriller about an art thief ( Willem Dafoe ) who gets trapped in a penthouse during a job. It's equal parts survival/escape thriller and existential parable, and while many viewers will enjoy its aesthetic and its puzzles, it's not for everyone. There's some violence, including cuts and injuries, blood and bloody wounds, unsettling hallucinations, a dead pigeon covered in maggots, a dying fish, and other off-putting imagery (including urine and a large pile of feces). Expect to see artwork that depicts explicit female nudity and graphic sex acts. The main character also appears in his underwear and briefly watches scrambled pornography on TV (the sound is heard). Language includes a few uses of "f--k," plus "ass," "damn," "hell," and "oh God." The main character drinks various wines and liquors throughout; another person seen on a security camera feed smokes cigarettes several times. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In INSIDE, skilled art thief Nemo ( Willem Dafoe ) breaks into a penthouse to steal three priceless paintings. But things don't go as planned. One of the paintings isn't where it's supposed to be, and the exit door code doesn't work. The penthouse automatically locks itself down, and Nemo's partner abandons him. Nemo is trapped, unable to open any doors or windows. Worse, the water and gas aren't working, and the central heating/cooling system starts raising the temperature to a stifling degree. As time passes, Nemo spends his time alternately finding ways to survive, brainstorming ways to escape, and pondering existence.

Is It Any Good?

Definitely not a standard Hollywood escape/survival thriller, this arty drama/thriller alternates between moments in which we root for the character to succeed and unsettling existential passages. Directed by Greek-born filmmaker Vasilis Katsoupis, Inside is beautifully designed, including every nook and cranny of the lavish, opulent penthouse, which is filled with actual works of art. Eventually the penthouse itself is turned into a work of art after Nemo moves furniture, leaves rubbish everywhere, and even sketches on the walls.

Multiple-Oscar nominee Dafoe does some impressive heavy lifting here; he's the only character on-screen, although viewers hear voices and see images of others through security cameras. The scenes in which he cleverly finds ways to survive and works through a lengthy escape are right out of a traditional thriller, solid and entertaining. But the other scenes and sequences -- the hallucinations, a rambling joke, passing the time, and other strange stuff -- can be off-putting. And, as Inside gets closer to its conclusion, it becomes more and more opaque, bristling with possible hidden meanings but difficult to pin down. Some viewers will enjoy pondering it, but others will understandably be frustrated or annoyed.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Inside 's violence. How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

What do you think the movie is about? Art? Survival? Something else?

Even though the main character is a thief, viewers are still meant to root for him to survive and escape. Why do you think this is?

How is sex depicted here? What values are imparted?

How are drinking and smoking portrayed? Are they glamorized? Are there consequences? Why does that matter?

Movie Details

• In theaters : March 17, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : April 4, 2023
• Cast : Willem Dafoe , Eliza Stuyck , Gene Bervoets
• Director : Vasilis Katsoupis
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Thriller
• Run time : 105 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language, some sexual content and nude images
• Last updated : August 8, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Movie Review: Inside

What We Liked

What we didn't like.

Anchored by a strong lead performance from Willem Dafoe, director Vasilis Katsoupis’ Inside proves to be an engaging and engrossing thriller that will keep the viewer mesmerized until the bitter end.

The nuts and bolts of the plot of Inside are that art thief Nemo (Willem Dafoe) finds himself trapped and abandoned in a New York penthouse/smart house after his crew leaves him to fend for himself after their planned robbery goes sideways. Unfortunately for Nemo though, the tenants of the home are on an extended trip leaving no food or other supplies in the house and the computer controlling the house has malfunctioned forcing him to devise a way to escape his smart prison before succumbing to starvation and the inevitable hallucinations he will suffer.

While it is only his second film – his first being 2016’s My Friend Larry Gus – director Vasilis Katsoupis shows a flare with Inside for telling a story with minimal means to maximum effect. Shot with a very sterile look by cinematographer Steve Annis, the film gives the viewer the impression of being trapped alongside Nemo throughout. Lambis Haralambidis’ editing allows Nemo’s descent into darkness to feel organic and natural, instead of being a hastily constructed narrative loophole that the film needed to jump through to get to the conclusion, overcoming any shortcomings in the effectiveness of the script by Ben Hopkins.

But it is the wildly provocative performance of Dafoe that holds the entirety of the film together. There is something to be said for a performer that manages to make a criminal sympathetic and someone that the audience will eventually hope comes to no harm, and Dafoe manages to do just that. Conversely, the various illusionary scenes featuring the somewhat unlikeable homeowner (Gene Bervoets) make Nemo out to be a hero of sorts, simply robbing an unworthy man of art he has no business owning as he cannot possibly appreciate it as does Nemo.

Willem Dafoe in “Inside.” © 2022 Focus Features, LLC.

Throughout his involuntary incarceration, Nemo redecorates the penthouse with various original art installations he creates as he grows increasingly unhinged. This allows the frustrated artist within him to reveal himself and offer some explanation as to why he has chosen the vocation that has led him to his current predicament. It is Dafoe’s ability to convey most of his character’s emotions through facial expressions and a few simple, muttered words that allow the whole of the film to prove as effective as it ultimately does. He is the consummate actor for a role like this which he never plays too over-the-top. In fact, he is the grounding force of the entire film, allowing it to achieve greater depths with himself than it might have with another actor at the helm.

Even though Inside may have its flaws, Willem Dafoe’s enigmatic performance is more than enough to carry the film from beginning to end in an effectively entertaining manner.

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It Lives Inside

It begins with your standard shot, a camera tracking through a modest but deteriorated home. In the abode’s hallways are dead, crumpled bodies. Screams can be heard emanating from an ajar door leading to the basement. We travel down creaky stairs to a body burned so badly that steam is still rising from the charcoaled skin. Its hand is outstretched to a glass jar filled with black smoke. This jar is merely a vessel, a metaphor for the difficulties faced by the Indian inhabitants of this white suburb. 

“It Lives Inside,” the feature directorial debut from Bishal Dutta , trades in cultural mythology and rote atmospheric frights to tell the story of Samidha (a captivating Megan Suri ). A smart, very popular student Samidha—she goes by Sam—is the kind of typical teenager with an overbearing mom ( Neeru Bajwa ) and a crush on the popular boy ( Gage Marsh ) at school common for these films. Her former best friend, Tamira ( Mohana Krishnan ), is well, going through it. Sleep-deprived and talking to herself, she totes the same glass jar we saw earlier. 

It’s enough to worry her teacher Joyce ( Betty Gabriel ), who approaches Sam and asks her to talk with Tamira. Sam, unfortunately, doesn’t want to be associated with the “crazy” Brown person and rebuffs Joyce’s pleas to stick together. She also ignores Tamira’s story about a specter haunting her. Sam doesn’t believe her friend until she accidentally breaks the jar. Tamira mysteriously goes missing; the creepily designed ghoul, composed of tiny teeth, comes to Sam’s dreams and begins attacking others around her. What follows is a movie that wants to be a teen movie and an allegory for the immigrant experience but never wholly coheres. 

Many will compare the mechanics of the film’s monster, a Pishach, to “ The Babadook .” Both beings demonstrate a desire to isolate their victims and work on their psyche. But the mythical being from Hindu and Buddhist mythology predates Jennifer Kent ’s film, speaking to the universality of how loneliness can warp the brain. The film translates that sense of othering, leading to assimilation, that can happen to Black and Brown people amid a white ecosystem. Sam, for instance, doesn’t want to go by her Indian name; she hangs out with micro-aggressive white kids over Tamira; she rarely speaks Hindi anymore and doesn’t bring anyone over to her home. Those decisions put her at odds with her traditionalist mother, causing your prototypical friction between parents and first-generation Americans to arise. 

One wishes Dutta pulled the weight of assimilation further, closer to what Remi Weekes did with “ His House ,” another horror flick similarly affixed to the immigrant experience. There are some hints that Dutta wants to take that route: We learn how the monster may have origins back in India and that it has passed between multiple Indian families, individuals who also feel isolated. But Dutta is too concerned with fashioning a less-than-successful suburban teen narrative. 

The primary reason Sam wants to fit in, as with any teen, but especially someone afraid of the cultural repercussions that come from being different, is for social cache. When one of her teenage friends is murdered in her presence, however, we never see the ramifications for Sam at school. She just continues to go to class. For an area suspicious of Brown people, these pearl-clutching white folks certainly aren’t searching for any answers. There’s no police presence, no outreach from the kid’s parents, no confrontation between Sam and literally anybody in this tiny community. It simply makes no sense. If you want to be a teen movie, you must keep viewers in that milieu rather than relying on the basic building blocks cobbled from other, better films.  

The visual language restricts the viewer too: While Dutta and cinematographer Matthew Lynn rely on close-ups (granting an immersive touch), they also love copying Spike Lee ’s double dolly shot. Rather than waiting for a key moment to unleash it, however, they use the move three times, each less successful in translating the interior angst felt by Sam than the last. Bad match cuts meant to instill horror fall flat, too, as does the basic sound design. The final freakout, a showdown in a basement between Sam and the monster, stretches on for far too long, losing rhythm and pace as Dutta maneuvers for an avenue to a sequel. 

Telling an Indian-American horror story, particularly one set in suburbia, should have allowed for plenty of rich opportunities. With major deficiencies like plot, themes, and tension holding Dutta’s film back, “It Lives Inside” is merely average on the outside.

Now playing in theaters. 

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the  New York Times ,  IndieWire , and  Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the  Los Angeles Times , and  Rolling Stone  about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

• Megan Suri as Samidha
• Neeru Bajwa as Poorna
• Mohana Krishnan as Tamira
• Betty Gabriel as Joyce
• Vik Sahay as Inesh
• Gage Marsh as Russ

Writer (story)

• Ashish Mehta
• Bishal Dutta

Cinematographer

• Matthew Lynn
• Wesley Hughes

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INSIDE Kriti Sanon's GORGEOUS Home

Kriti Sanon, whose had a good run at the box office recently with films like Tere Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya and Crew , lives in a stunning duplex apartment in Andheri, north west Mumbai, with her sister and parents.

The apartment, which comes with a breathtaking view of the Mumbai skyline, is on the 27th-28th floor and belongs to Amitabh Bachchan.

Yes, Kriti has been renting the property from the Big B which is spread across 5,000 square feet. Namrata Thakker gives us a tour.

White walls against wooden flooring look aesthetically pleasing, adding richness to the space.

Kriti enjoys the sunset from her huge balcony.

The sliding glass doors in the background and the unique ball-shaped chandelier lighting definitely adds more character.

Want to make a statement with your flooring? Opt for a black-and-white graphic marble pattern and spice up your home. Guess which other star has this flooring ?

We like how Kriti’s minimalist balcony gives a clean and contemporary look.

And of course, that view is to die for! No wonder, the Mimi heroine loves spending her quiet mornings here with her fur buddies.

Here's the beautiful terrace garden with an uninterrupted view of the gorgeous Mumbai skyline.

How pretty is this little corner dedicated to the home temple?

The spacious living room elegantly done in neutral colours with minimal furniture.

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The first thing that greets you when you enter the Sanon residence is this gorgeous grey door with gold handles.

A lovely corner where Kriti and Phoebe meditate.

Photographs curated by Satish Bodas/ Rediff.com

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'Never Let Go' Is Set to Frighten Its Way to Its First Box Office Milestone

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The newest horror on the cinema scene, Never Let Go has only been in theaters for four days and is already about to hit its first milestone. After an opening weekend that saw each day earn over $1 million, the movie is now set to hit the $5 million mark worldwide , with almost the entirety of that total achieved domestically. With an opening in only 2,667 theaters domestically, the Halle Berry -led horror has done well to fight stiff competition to entice theatergoers to part with their money, thanks in no small part to a stellar lead performance from the Academy Award winner.

It's been reported that Never Let Go had a total budget of just $20 million , with it looking as if the movie may reach that marker within its time in theaters. Alas, simply reaching that mark isn't enough to make a film successful, but still stands as a neat threshold to aim for. In the most recent daily box office rankings , Never Let Go finished fourth behind horror rival Speak No Evil , the brand-new Transformers One , and the all-conquering Beetlejuice Beetlejuice . A feather in the film's cap will certainly be beating Deadpool & Wolverine in said daily ranking, with the Marvel threequel one of the year's biggest successes.

'Never Let Go' Exceeded Some People's Expectations

At a time when horror movies seem to be on a resurgence , it can become difficult to keep up with the competition. Never Let Go , considering its young cast and reliance on one setting, already sets itself a tough task to mine success, but, alas, many critics thus far seem to be pleased with the final product. One such critic full of praise for the film was Collider's Jeff Ewing, who said in his review :

" Never Let Go may be another in a long line of horror entries set in isolated cabins in danger-infested woods, but a few aspects give it a unique feel. The family dynamics both complement the horror and shift and change in interesting ways throughout , keeping the limited setting from feeling stale. The tension is regularly palpable, the evil grotesque, highly personal, and ever-changing , and some surprising scares rank among the year's best. The finale could use a little honing (greater context, a little more clarity, some tighter thematic context and background information), but it's still full of enough twists, tension, and surprises to have a solid time at the theater that audiences will be thinking about afterward ."

Never Let Go is about to hit the $5 million mark at the global box office. You can catch the movie in theaters right now.

Never Let Go

A family that has been haunted by an evil spirit for years. Their safety and their surroundings come into question when one of the children questions if the evil is real.

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