Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 19 March

Inside (Katsoupis, 2023)

I know that there are quite a few act­ors sub­scribed to this news­let­ter, and that you are prob­ably already aware of how good Willem Dafoe is, but this one still deserves a shoutout anyway.

It was pro­grammed in the New Zealand International Film Festival last year so I pre­viewed it for RNZ:

Willem Dafoe plays Nemo, an art thief who breaks into a lux­ury Manhattan apart­ment with a shop­ping list of works to snaffle and a tick­ing clock to avoid the alarm. But, some­thing goes wrong with the secur­ity sys­tem and everything around him locks, leav­ing him trapped dozens of storeys above the city.

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He dis­cov­ers that this was less an apart­ment to be lived in than one to simply dis­play the art col­lec­tion. There is no run­ning water – except for the sprink­lers keep­ing the indoor garden alive – very little food in the fridge, no phone and an air con­di­tion­ing sys­tem that is either very, very hot or very, very cold.

A kind of cast­away movie, Inside sees Dafoe attempt to jerry up some basic liv­ing con­di­tions from found mater­i­als but as his men­tal health deteri­or­ates we start to won­der wheth­er a) he has become an art exhib­it him­self, on show for a watch­ing pat­ron or b) is becom­ing an artist him­self as he des­per­ately repur­pose or decon­structs all the works around him in order to be heard or seen by the out­side world.

It’s quite a gruelling watch but in less­er hands than Dafoe, this film would be even tough­er than it is. Carrying the whole thing on his shoulders, he can access a light­ness of touch that gets you through the exist­en­tial anguish.

Other films in that pre­view include: Skolimowski’s EO and Anderson’s Asteroid City.

Where to watch Inside

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon or a digit­al rent­al from Apple

Australia: Streaming on Netflix

Canada & USA: Streaming on Prime Video

UK: Digital rent­al from the usu­al outlets

Further reading

The Māoriland Film fest­iv­al gets under way in Ōtaki tomor­row until Sunday and I was lucky enough to pre­view some of the titles for RNZ.

And, Matt Nippert in the NZ Herald has dug into the fin­ances of the New Zealand International Film Festival and the story is not pretty. The full hor­ror is behind the Herald paywall.