Leave it to the French to usher in the next great wave of horror cinema. As youth riots once again send bourgeois suburbanites running for the safety of their middle-class compounds, the prevailing culture of fear and uncertainty has proven the flashpoint for some of the most genuinely frightening shockers of the new millennium. Now, on the heels of such relentlessly tense new-classics as Calvaire, Haute Tension, and Them comes a grisly home invasion flick that offers a pitch-perfect balance of grinding tension and inventive gore. Newcomers Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury may not have enough credits to distinguish themselves as masters of the genre just yet, but as Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur before them, they're certainly on the right track.
The story, involving an expectant mother who has decided to spend Christmas Eve alone before having labor induced the following morning, effectively taps into a multitude of universal fears as it follows her struggle against a mysterious assailant who appears at her window determined to extract her unborn child. After setting the story up with a jarring intro that isn't quite as simple as it first seems, screenwriter/co-director (along with Maury) Bustillo smartly pulls back to let the tension build, briefly lulling the viewer into a false sense of complacency before unleashing a primal barrage of soul-scarring ferocity -- every excruciating beat perfectly complimented by the hazy cinematography of Laurent Bares and the masterful editing of frequent Aja collaborator Baxter. Ultimately, the key to the film's success rests largely on Bustillo's smart, finely tuned screenplay, which pulls out all the stops to frazzle the nerves and assault the senses. With one clichéd exception involving a darkened house and a breaker box, Bustillo's characters react to their dilemma in the exact way the viewer expects that they might -- a true rarity in a genre that all-too-often falls back on flawed logic in order to keep the story moving forward. Match this with a deeply unsettling score that drifts from Tangerine Dream-style droning to knitting-needle-in-the-ear stings in the flash of a blade, and you've got the recipe for the essential "horror-thriller."
Of course all of this can easily amount to naught if the villain of the piece isn't as colorful and clearly-defined as the protagonist, and Beatrice Dalle's scissor-wielding psychopath offers the perfect counter-balance to star Alysson Paradis's dead-on-the-inside heroine -- the tragic motivations of the former only come into play late in the final act, skillfully inverting the meaning of a crucial early scene. With her flowing black dress and ridiculously oversized scissors, Dalle's cigarette smoking, cat-crushing angel of death bears all the hallmarks of an iconic screen villain, and chances are good that she'll be stalking the nightmares of more sensitive viewers for some time to come. In the end, Inside packs a punch that's not only powerful enough to shake women who shiver at headlines about unborn babies being ripped from the womb by maniacal strangers, but virtually any viewer -- male or female -- who's willing to have their mettle tested by a pair of first-time filmmakers who have yet to be softened by age -- and who boldly defy the widely-held theory that gore and tension are mutually exclusive.