Willem Dafoe’s Inside and the artwork of entrapment

THE SELF-PORTRAIT ISN’T THERE. In any other case, the heist goes effective. Willem Dafoe has breached the penthouse, thwarted the alarm, situated two pretty chaste however nonetheless expensive Schieles. There’s only one factor, although. The self-portrait: Dafoe can’t discover it. As a substitute is a form of picture-book orgy that includes an eerie likeness of the condo’s proprietor. Time is operating out. The “sensible dwelling” glitches and all of the doorways slam shut. Our hero is trapped, imprisoned, surrounded by priceless artwork, selection design, and an eight-figure view of Manhattan.

That is the premise of Vasilis Katsoupis’s Inside: A housebreaking gone flawed leaves a thief caught in an ultraluxury unit with slim hope of rescue and a woefully understocked fridge. It’s billed as a survival flick, like an city Solid Away (2000) or a reprise of Dafoe’s sensible, pervy insanity in Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse (2019), with a zeitgeisty class-war twist. He defecates within the dwelling spa and makes meatballs of the tropical fish. Is he a hapless Robin Hood, attempting to liberate these masterpieces from this wealthy man’s sepulcher? Perhaps—but it surely’s additionally clearly private. He appears to know the proprietor from some previous life, and also you rapidly get the sense that “inside” means not simply indoors or in jail however inside job.

The actual thrill of this caper is watching Willem Dafoe fill 100 minutes of screentime along with his singular, elastic physique. Certainly, apart from some odd flashbacks or hallucinations of an artwork opening and a housekeeper he creeps on the safety cameras, it’s all Dafoe, on a regular basis. There’s a very particular second which few different actors may have made attention-grabbing: Our thief is operating so low on water, he decides to lick the frost from the freezer cabinets. We’re handled to a protracted, icebox’s-eye view of his rapt pleasure, the sight of a person fully alone and uninhibited framed like a portrait, a white plastic body inside a body.

He nonetheless can’t discover the self-portrait. What may it imply? Inside is an allegory within the vein of grandiose auteurist visions like Darren Aronofsky’s Mom (2017) and Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021), two movies through which the “father” seems to be God. The god of Inside isn’t so current—extra the silent Catholic sort than a chatty Evangelical deity—however the Pritzker Prize–profitable architect who owns and probably constructed the rental is a powerful candidate. Symbolism abounds. There’s the descent into the HVAC Inferno the place, marking the movie’s first and second acts, the haywire pc begins roasting Dafoe alive earlier than attempting to freeze him out. There’s his determined try and name for assist by setting off the sprinkler system—the Deluge comes, every little thing will get soaked, but the architect’s pad is so watertight that the tremendous doesn’t discover. A pigeon slowly dies on the porch, displaying the passage of time.

The artwork, too, is stuffed with tedious symbols. The director employed Leonardo Bigazzi, a curator who usually consults on movies, to brighten the thief’s gilded cage. Within the sheer absence of God, the artworks on the wall act as Dafoe’s castigators. Some are somewhat on the nostril, just like the Maurizio Cattelan C-print of a Milanese gallerist duct-taped to the wall, or a David Horvitz neon that reads, “On a regular basis that can come after this second.” Others are beguiling, like a Superstudio print of the Steady Monument masking New York, or the watercolor of a nude splitting gentle right into a rainbow by Francesco Clemente that the digital camera lingers on all through the movie. (A rainbow? Effectively, I suppose that is a biblical image!)

And sure, the self-portrait. Dafoe finds it, months into the heist, after prying open a closet to find a dim, absinthe-tinted panic room. There’s additionally what appears to be like like an unique illuminated copy of William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell—positioned on the chest of a creepy sculpture of the architect as a corpse. Dafoe, whose earlier roles embody each Jesus and Satan, right here paraphrases Blake: “Man has no physique distinct from the soul. Power is the one life and is from the physique. Power is everlasting delight.” The physique is the soul’s self- portrait.

We all know from a labored voiceover that Dafoe’s character is an artist, has been from a younger age. Within the first act he settles in sufficient to make some sketches of the housekeeper. Within the final act he’s regressing to wall drawings, mad charcoal spirals; assemblage from metal nuts, rugs, and refuse. He’s gaunt and ravenous and residing in a mystic stage of squalor. His final gambit is to lash collectively a pile of modernist furnishings with strips of upholstery and ascend this Babel to an enormous skylight, an inverted stepped pyramid glowing within the solar. The movie’s final shot is of the wrecked, empty room, and the skylight with its backside panel lacking. Did he escape? Did he die? In a film with such religion in uncertainty, both end result could be a continuity error.

Even contractually trapped in a tacky art-world allegory of heaven and hell, Saint Willem can do no flawed. His character is meant to seek out redemption in artwork, but it surely’s actually his artwork, the extreme cathedral of his expertise as an actor, that redeems us, prisoners of an indulgent movie. Dafoe performed van Gogh within the 2018 Julian Schnabel film, however Inside additionally remembers his bit half in one other Schnabel-directed biopic, 1996’s Basquiat, the place he climbs down a ladder and into the shot to confide to Jean-Michel that he’s not only a handyman, he’s an artist, too.

— Travis Diehl

Inside opens in US theaters on March 10.