I heard rumors about a French horror film that was too intense to be released in American theaters. After finding out that the duo responsible for this film, Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury, were set to work on the upcoming Hellraiser remake, and reading some very positive reviews, I could not resist the opportunity to attend a limited screening of Inside (À l'intérieur). After the first 30 minutes or so, I feared that I had let my expectations get too high. By the end of the final frame of the movie, I knew that I could not have been more wrong. This is undoubtedly one of the best horror films that I have ever seen.

In one tragic moment during the middle of her pregnancy, our heroine Sarah is involved in a deadly two car collision. She and her unborn child survived. The love of her life and father of her child did not. 5 months later, the now widowed Sarah is spending Christmas alone. It will be her last night alone as she will be going in to the hospital to have labor induced the next day. Only we will soon find out… Sarah is not alone.

In the middle of the night, there is a knock at the door. The woman on the other side claims that she has just been in an accident and asks if she can come in to use the phone. An untrusting Sarah refuses the woman entry, and rightly so. It soon becomes apparent that this female stranger knows quite a bit about Sarah, her dead husband & their unborn child. In fact, this woman is not only determined to get inside the house… she is determined to get what is inside Sarah.

Inside is an example of modern day film-making at its best. It takes a simple premise of a woman being trapped inside her house by a deranged lunatic and turns it into something truly spectacular.

The first thing that makes this movie great are the performances of the two female leads, especially Beatrice Dalle as ‘the stranger.’ This woman was seriously disturbed, yet diabolical, calculating and very driven. Her determination to get what she wants was almost inhuman, yet her motivations (which we discover towards the end of the film) are very human and almost make her sympathetic in a twisted sort of way.

The second is the setting and the way it was utilized. The mayhem takes place in a secluded house in the woods. The way this setting was filmed creates a sense of isolation, and given the fact that our lead could go into labor at any moment, a greater sense of helplessness. There is also a great use of light and shadows in the house. The stranger wears a black dress and blends seamlessly into the darkness to the point where the viewer sees her in every shadow. Excellent use of psychology.

Oh and by the way, it is with good reason that Inside (À l'intérieur) did not get a theatrical release in the U.S. and it is not because this is straight-to-DVD fare. This film is just far too violent and bloody to be shown in any American theater. I’m not talking about the fun over-the-top gore of movies like Hatchet or Planet Terror. I’m talking about the brutal unrelenting violence of a movie like High Tension, only turned up a several notches. I saw this at a horror convention in a small theater filled with seasoned gore-hound veterans, and a number of scenes had the majority of us begging for mercy. There was only one scene where the blood seemed a bit over the top, but just one.

This movie is not without flaws, such as a WTF moment involving survival logic (or lack thereof), and an above-average but seemingly unspectacular first third of the movie. But the film as a whole more than makes up for any flaws… by a longshot! There is a good chance that I am writing this review too closely after seeing the movie and haven’t fully let it digest, but my gut instinct tells me that Inside is a modern day masterpiece, and could be an instant classic, and one that I will definitely be adding to my horror collection the very moment it hits DVD.

10 out of 10 worst case scenarios involving a cigarette and an aerosol spray can. YIKES!!!