Do you enjoy watching Willem Dafoe steadily slip into madness? Of course you do. We all do. He’s made a career of steadily slipping into madness and done really, really well. But you haven’t seen him steadily slip into madness while locked in an expensive apartment adorned with expensive art that he was in the middle of trying to steal, have you? Well, now we’ll all get our chance with Inside, which has dropped its first appropriately disturbing trailer today that features Willem Dafoe almost exclusively.
As you can see from the trailer, the plot of Inside is pretty simple: Willem Dafoe plays an art thief named Nemo, who is pulling off a high-stakes job. However, it goes sideways and the luxury high-rise condo he’s stealing from suddenly becomes a luxury high-rise prison cell. With no way out and abandoned by his cohorts, Nemo struggles to escape while also clearly going a bit insane. The trailer teases a film that’s half an inverted Castaway, half psychological horror, half MacGyver, half a meditation on art itself, and half a discussion with an injured pigeon. Is that too many halves? No, it’s art.
The movie hails from Focus Features and is directed by Vasilis Katsoupis from a screenplay by Ben Hopkins. Katsoupis has made one other film in 2015 and nothing else, so coupled with Focus putting Inside out, we can expect some pretty weird shit to go down while Nemo is locked in his expensive prison, all turned up to 11 thanks to Dafoe playing the character. This likely won’t be a traditional escape thriller, but instead a slow-burn psychological trip into this guy’s mind with some hints of escape thriller in there. That sounds pretty exciting or at least incredibly trippy as the audience devolves into insanity staring at Dafoe’s iconic smile.
Inside will release on March 10, 2023 in theaters.
