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‘inside’ review: willem dafoe adds another tortured soul to his portrait gallery in a suffocating intellectual exercise.

Greek director Vasilis Katsoupis’ first dramatic feature is a high-concept thriller about a master art thief trapped in a luxury New York penthouse that turns on him.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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But Inside might represent a new extreme, trapping the actor alone onscreen for the duration — aside from one or two brief dream detours — to wrestle with the technology of a mutinous luxury smart home and, most of all, with himself. That will make this March release from Focus a tough sell, especially since it feels less like a story than an agonized fever dream, or one of those endurance art installations, like Tilda Swinton snoozing in a glass box at MoMA.

Dafoe plays an art thief named Nemo who breaks into the sprawling Manhattan penthouse of an unidentified one-percenter with the specific task of removing some prized portraits by Egon Schiele, valued at a cool $3 million. But before he can slip away, the security system malfunctions and he’s stuck there, abandoned by his accomplice on the outside. Turns out the apartment is designed to make escape just as difficult as forced entry.

In voiceover at the start of the film, Nemo recalls being asked as a child which three things would he save if his house was on fire. While his classmates at school dutifully listed family members, he boiled it down to an AC/DC CD, his cat and his sketchbooks. On subsequent reflection he discovered, “Cats die, music fades, but art is for keeps.”

That’s a pretty bleak summation to leave an audience with after almost two hours of grueling imprisonment set to a brooding ambient score. But Katsoupis and his screenwriter Ben Hopkins are not interested in rewarding our patience with revelations any more than they are in providing an unambiguous ending. This is a movie that aims to ponder big questions of physical and spiritual survival, of the resilience of the soul, the primacy of energy as it’s steadily drained from the protagonist.

Inside is also, it has to be said, a bit of a masturbatory exercise, of the type that’s irresistible to a brainy actor’s actor like Dafoe. The full-tilt commitment of his performance as Nemo spirals into madness is aided by the imagination of Katsoupis and Hopkins, continually throwing new challenges at him as his confinement stretches on and it becomes clear that no one is coming to liberate or arrest him.

That includes the same kind of elemental hardships that beset the characters in outdoor survival stories as the water is shut off and the air-conditioning system goes haywire, cranking the temperature up over 100 degrees and then down to a teeth-chattering chill. And just as Tom Hanks had the volleyball Wilson for company in Cast Away , Nemo has a wounded pigeon grounded on the terrace just beyond the unbreakable glass doors.

But the movie’s high concept becomes steadily more limiting — eventually almost as exhausting for the audience as it is for Nemo. His imagined interactions with the building concierge, residents or especially a cleaner that he observes daily on the closed-circuit monitors do little to shake up the static nature of the thrill-deprived thriller.

Nor do his fantasy interludes or his windy pontifications about visual art, sparked by the striking collection of contemporary work on display throughout the penthouse, curated by Leonardo Bigazzi. Ultimately, those art pieces seem to both mirror and mock Nemo’s psychological deterioration, just as the smart home technology has been doing.

Production designer Thorsten Sabel’s apartment is a visual knockout, a deluxe serve of Architectural Digest porn that dazzles with its opulent austerity and then visibly hardens into a cold, unaccommodating citadel of capitalist privilege, in which the intruder must pay with his sanity.

The director’s work can’t be faulted for its rigorousness, and as a tightly packaged COVID construct, this is more inventive than most. But even the formidable Dafoe at his most intense ultimately can’t stop Inside from succumbing to its own narrowness, devolving into a self-reflexive portrait of soul-sucking isolation.

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• Review: Willem Dafoe Is an Art Thief Confronting a Long Night of the Soul in <i>Inside</i>

Review: Willem Dafoe Is an Art Thief Confronting a Long Night of the Soul in Inside

I t’s a wonder we didn’t all go mad. How did we even survive the early days of the pandemic, a seemingly interminable epoch during which many of us spent long hours holed up in our sad little towers, captives in sweatpants gazing longingly at the outside world? Vasilis Katsoupis’ intriguingly odd little psychological thriller Inside isn’t a pandemic parable per se, but it’s likely to resurrect some jittery memories of those days even so. A high-end art thief played by Willem Dafoe botches a burglary and finds himself trapped alone in an art-filled luxury penthouse, for hours that stretch into days. Will he get out, and if so, how? Meanwhile, what is all that time spent alone—not to mention all that art, which includes an elegantly haunting Egon Schiele self-portrait—doing to his brain?

There’s a lot going on in this captivating, buzzingly cerebral picture. Written by Ben Hopkins, from an idea by Katsoupis, Inside is partly a black comedy about enforced solitude. But it’s also about the ways art can sustain us even as it may incite feelings we’d rather not deal with, and it tangles with the messy process of creating art in the first place: for some, that creation is a compulsion, almost a prison break of the mind, a way to make sense of the entropy of the human psyche.

Inside is essentially a one-man extravaganza for Dafoe, and he shoulders its complexities ably, with zero vanity. At the film’s beginning, Dafoe’s Nemo is a confident heist-master, disabling alarm systems with ease and freeing priceless pictures from the wall with a magician’s deftness. The penthouse’s zillionaire owner is in Kazakhstan for an unknown length of time, and he’s set up complex technology to babysit his possessions while he’s gone. None of this circuitry intimidates Nemo; he’s studied it like a master.

Until it all goes haywire, and Nemo finds himself locked inside a luxury pad turned sinister. The temperature controls zig and zag with a mind of their own, leaving him sweating one minute and shivering the next. There’s no running water. To amuse himself, Nemo contemplates the paintings and sculptures around him. (They include works from artists like Francesco Clemente, some specially commissioned for the film.) Before long, his response to his confinement becomes a work of art itself, one whose creation drives him into a semiferal state. Dafoe is alive to every shift: When he strips down, his bony shoulders have a temple-like austerity. When he sweats, every pore seems alert. Some of these descent-into-madness transitions may not be easy to watch, but they’re never, ever boring.

Inside is magnetic precisely because it doesn’t hand over easy answers. It can feel arty and arch, a bit taken with its own somber cleverness. And then Katsoupis pulls off a hilarious little curlicue, like an interlude in which Nemo performs a cooking-show routine for an audience of no one. His meal of choice is pasta selected from the apartment’s ever waning pantry staples, soaked overnight in cold water. He goes through the preparation steps, all two of them, with the affability of Ina Garten.

Read More: The 49 Most Anticipated Movies of 2023

Even that little bit of pasta water is a precious commodity: it comes from a timed sprinkler that’s been set up to hydrate one of the apartment’s key features, a small, lush indoor forest. Nemo waits and waits to hear the hiss of that sprinkler, and when it finally comes, he flops down in this mini Eden and cackles with joy amid the glittering spray. It’s a moment of heaven in a peculiar kind of hell. Leave it to Dafoe to make the most of every drop.

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‘Inside’ Review: Willem Dafoe Is Riveting as a Thief Stuck Alone in a Gilded Cage

Director Vasilis Katsoupis concocts a clever premise and grand role for his star, but the story doesn’t have staying power.

By Murtada Elfadl

Murtada Elfadl

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Willem Dafoe defies classification. He appears in blockbusters and arthouse films, in lead roles or as part of an ensemble. What can be counted on is that he’ll add a dash of idiosyncratic malevolence to whatever part he’s playing. Whether he’s playing Christ, Antichrist or somewhere in between, there’s always something slightly off that makes him watchable. In “ Inside ,” director Vasilis Katsoupis provides him with a showcase part in what is essentially a one-man show that Dafoe carries with aplomb.

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Dafoe’s an inventive and agile character actor, handsome and appealing but also possessing distinctive malleable features. All this makes him perfect for this one-man show, as he’s never less than immensely watchable. He’s called upon to telegraph Nemo’s emotional state through his body. Images of his back and hunched shoulders fill the frame. He’s shown on the floor in the fetus position and the camera patiently closes up on the creases of his neck and hands. His body becomes a canvas for the filmmakers to convey not just the loneliness of the character but also the unnecessariness of collecting art as possessions. All these beautiful pieces cannot sustain Nemo in any way.

Halfway into a mostly silent performance, Nemo playacts as if he’s a cook in a TV show. His solitary existence drives him to talk back to the security footage on the TV. What a welcome relief to hear Dafoe’s voice and see him animated with emotion. Finally he gets to do something other than the silent poses he has been doing for most of the running time. In so doing, “Inside” reveals what’s been absent all along.

With this premise, there’s ultimately no place to go. As the story unfolds, the audience feels as stuck as Nemo, with no escape in sight. The film has exhausted both the premise and its leading man’s capabilities, while the audience has grown tired of pondering whatever themes it purports to examine. It’s time to part ways, and yet the images keep flickering on screen and the film keeps going. “Inside” has an intriguing premise and an actor who makes whatever’s thrown at him intriguingly watchable. What it lacks is sufficient sense of who this character is, and a resonant enough narrative to justify being locked up together.

Reviewed online, March 15, 2023. In Berlin Film Festival. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 105 MIN.

• Production: (U.K.-Germany-Belgium-Switzerland-Greece) A Focus Features release, presented in association with Film-Und Medienstiftung, NRW, Eurimages, Greek Film Center, Screen Flanders, MFG Baden-Würtemberg, German Federal Film Fund, Bord Cadre Films, Sovereign Films, Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media of a Heretic, Schiwgo Film, A Private View production, in co-production with BNP Paribas, Fortis Film Finance, ERT, MMC Movies. Producers: Giorgos Karnavas, Marcos Kantis, Dries Phlypo. Executive producers: Jim Stark, Vasilis Katsoupis, Konstantinos Kontovrakis, Charles E. Breitkreuz, Martin Lehwald, Jean-Claude, Van Rijckeghem, Stephen Kelliher.
• Crew: Director: Vasilis Katsoupis. Writer: Ben Hopkins. Camera: Steven Annis. Production Designer: Thorsten Sabel. Art Curator: Leonardo Bigazzi. Editor: Lambis Haralambidis.
• With: Willem Dafoe.

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Review: Trapped and alone, Willem Dafoe transcends art in psychological thriller ‘Inside’

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“Art is for keeps.” This turn of phrase, uttered by Willem Dafoe’s character Nemo in Vasilis Katsoupis’ narrative directorial debut, “Inside,” is a bedeviling little saying of multilayered meaning. It rattles around in your brain like a pinball, much in the way Nemo rattles around the luxury apartment where he’s trapped after an art heist gone wrong.

“Art is for keeps” — it speaks to the way we place value on art, and it’s also a cheeky taunt as Nemo helps himself to million-dollar works of modern art in the penthouse apartment of a wealthy collector. Later, it’s a statement that will haunt and even threaten Nemo, alone, in an increasingly dire survivalist situation, with only art to nourish him.

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“Inside,” written by Ben Hopkins (from a concept by Katsoupis), pits the most primal elements of humanity against the most advanced in order to tease out the contradictory and alienating nature of our current world. A coolly discerning camera takes in the apartment of this wealthy collector, away in Kazakhstan, as Nemo breaks in, overriding the security panel with codes fed to him by his partner on a walkie-talkie. Unable to locate a specific painting, he’s running out of time and attempts to escape, but the security system malfunctions and he’s trapped inside the apartment, a heavy, ornately carved wooden door sealing the vault.

There’s a certain suspension of disbelief required to believe that there’s truly no way out. But this highly automated smart home, which plays the “Macarena” when the fridge is open too long and features a full sprinkler system in case of fire, is so technologically advanced that there’s not even a phone, computer or access to the outside. It’s a luxurious prison, a gilded cage filled with priceless works of art whose value becomes null in this harrowing survivalist situation — after all, you can’t eat art.

But Katsoupis and Hopkins don’t undercut the value of artistic expression entirely. Nemo devolves in this nightmarish quarantine — first adapting, then struggling, literally battling the elements as the glitching home automation system blasts him with heat, then freezing cold. The water has been turned off, and he resorts to collecting it from the automated indoor sprinklers and licking moisture from the freezer. He dines on caviar before he starves, turning a hungry eye toward the exotic fish that swim unbothered in their tank high in the sky.

It’s “Survivor: Penthouse Apartment,” and it maps our 2020 experience of staying home during the pandemic (watch as Nemo pretends to host a cooking show) and explores some of the trauma that comes from this kind of isolation and alienation engendered by technology that is intended to make our lives more comfortable but, more often than not, keeps us apart.

Nemo has only works of art to keep him company, but his desire for connection and expression doesn’t die. He develops parasocial relationships with the building staff on the security monitors, unable to cry out to or connect with them. He eventually devolves into a sort of Early Man type, scrawling on the walls, creating strange altars and structures, developing an almost religious fervor in his isolation.

Katsoupis calls into question the overly inflated value of art while reminding us that expression is inherently human and elemental. It sits closer to the top on our hierarchy of needs than we might assume.

Katsoupis poses these probing and provocative questions about humanity but doesn’t offer any clear answers or messages. Rather, he lets his muse, Dafoe , simply inhabit this harrowing journey with his strange magnetism and sense of timelessness, in a performance that is simultaneously primitive and transcendent. Nemo becomes a figure straight out of Greek mythology, reckoning with the forces of creation and destruction, but it’s unclear whether he’s Sisyphus, Prometheus or perhaps even Icarus.

Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

'Inside'

Rating: R, for language, some sexual content and nude images Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes Playing: Starts March 17 in general release

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Inside Reviews

Willem Dafoe is the best company should one be trapped in an apartment. The multifaceted actor animates this blackly comic survival drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 1, 2024

It’s all very minimalist and for at least its first half Inside is a gripping survival story. But Inside wears out its welcome, slipping ever more deeply into improbability.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Sep 22, 2023

Though it's no easy task to connect and absorb everything it throws at you, 'Inside' is a captivating thematic feast anchored by the ever-masterful Willem Dafoe.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 31, 2023

Inside begins as a tale of American ingenuity a la The Martian, but evolves into an ambiguous critique on the art world and an uncertain allegory about heaven and hell...

Full Review | Aug 21, 2023

Some may complain about the thin plot or its implausibility (how is he not found?), but the bleak narrative is a character study of an unreliable, unraveling narrator who claims to value art above all else and discovers that his dream is a nightmare.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 16, 2023

The film runs out of things to do faster than Willem Dafoe whose unique survival story becomes less compelling the moment it tries to take us further inside his head to concentrate on the why whether than the what ifs.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 2, 2023

Like the penthouse, Inside is a lavishly decorated, but ultimately sparse, reflection on art.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Though undeniably on-the-nose, Vasilis Katsoupis’s survival film delivers a sturdy meditation on the value of art and an even sturdier Willem Dafoe performance.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

We’re left with a movie with a Willem Dafoe in splendid form, great technical execution and an intriguing premise, but that doesn’t really do anything with it, and gets lost in its own cleverness instead.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 23, 2023

Give credit to them for building certain areas but after an hour and a half film starts to lose me. Dafoe is great, the cinematography is great, and directing is stellar, but this is not my cup of tea even if the film is well made.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 22, 2023

Thanks to the superb acting chops of Willem Dafoe, the somewhat irritating elements in the film’s narrative presentation are drowned down.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Jul 21, 2023

Inside is basically a one-man show, and when that one man is Willem Dafoe, a great performance is pretty much guaranteed.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 17, 2023

It’s a testament to Dafoe’s intensity that we continue to worry over him even as we realize the story isn’t likely to build to a resounding finale. That may disappoint some, but Inside suggests that we’re witnessing the creation of a new work of art.

Full Review | May 29, 2023

I found this unfinished nightmare to be more pretentious than gripping, yet kudos to Dafoe for the dedicated performance.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | May 5, 2023

It's Willem Dafoe's Master Class in acting but agony to watch...and as a psychological thriller, it's really, really boring.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | May 3, 2023

Inside offers a glimpse at confinement and its ties to madness, as well as dependence on technology. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Apr 25, 2023

Dafoe, with his angular body and eyes always looking for a way out of his cage, is fascinating to examine as his character seeks the answers for his life-or-death dilemma. He’s trapped in “Inside,” but never not in command.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 23, 2023

Inside was one of those rare gems that I never expect to come across but when I do I like to scream about it from the rooftops. It’s that good.

Full Review | Apr 22, 2023

When your movie is this simple, and the simple stuff is the stuff that doesn’t work, it’s really distracting.

Full Review | Apr 20, 2023

It’s conceivable you could enjoy the film just on the level of watching Dafoe move around, change his posture as Nemo starts losing his bearings, grunt and whistle. It’s a full, and fully physical, performance, and it deserves to be in a better film.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Apr 12, 2023

• Entertainment

‘Inside’ review: A close-up view of Willem Dafoe’s descent into madness

Movie review.

How you feel about the psychological thriller “Inside” may depend on how you feel about spending the better part of two hours staring nonstop at Willem Dafoe. The actor plays Nemo, an art thief who becomes trapped in a posh Manhattan penthouse after the security system malfunctions. Time goes by — days, weeks, months — and we’re alone with Nemo, who does some impressive MacGyvering of the furniture, eats some things I’d rather not contemplate and starts to lose his grip on reality.

As might you, by the end of “Inside,” which grimly catalogs the slow deterioration of the apartment and of Nemo. Director Vasilis Katsoupis , working from a screenplay by Ben Hopkins, utilizes numerous extreme close-ups of his star (and not just his face; seriously, by the end of this film, I felt like I could identify the nape of Dafoe’s neck in a lineup) and glides right over any questions we might have about the plausibility of the plot. Nemo knows no one who might be looking for him? No one in the building heard banging in a supposedly unoccupied apartment? Rich people really turn off the water supply to their apartment when they go out of town? None of this matters; “Inside” is not about logic, it is about survival, about what it means to have art when you have nothing else, about what happens when life comes down to just being.

These are potentially interesting themes, but “Inside” doesn’t fully engage with them, nor does it give us much of a sense of Nemo’s full story (who was this man, before he got trapped in a heist gone wrong?). Instead, it becomes something of a horror film, in which the apartment — an ultramodern aerie whose furnishings seem aggressively uncomfortable, lit in a chilly blue light — appears to be trying to kill Nemo. The heat unbearably zooms up and then plummets, the water and food supply quickly becomes perilous, the closed-circuit video of people in the lobby and hallways going about their lives feels like torture. Meanwhile, the art seems to be watching, taunting him — it’s both priceless and worthless, as it can’t help him now — and time goes by … very, very slowly.

But the film’s not-so-secret weapon is Dafoe, an ever-intriguing actor who’s incapable of a flat performance. Like Robert Redford trapped alone on a slowly sinking boat in “ All Is Lost ” (the two films would make a fascinating if deeply depressing double feature), he believably creates a man slowly slipping away, yet determined to hang on to whatever toehold he can find. Dafoe, who has an uncanny way of aging before our eyes, finds detail everywhere: in the way Nemo nods after tasting water from the sprinkler, as if approving the wine; in his schticky narration of his dinner assembly, a performance to an audience of no one; in the raw animal panic on his face in the late scenes, as darkness falls. He can’t quite save “Inside,” but he does make you believe Nemo is worth saving.

With Willem Dafoe. Directed by Vasilis Katsoupis, from a screenplay by Ben Hopkins. 105 minutes. Rated R for language, some sexual content and nude images. Opens March 16 at multiple theaters.

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The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.

Inside review: Being stuck in a room with Willem Dafoe is pretty thrilling

Dafoe plays an art thief trapped in a high-tech manhattan apartment in this cunning, immersive art world critique.

With his acerbic eyes on the brink of mischief, and a knowing smile that often suggests something a little darker than meets the eye, Willem Dafoe, the star of The Last Temptation Of The Christ and At Eternity’s Gate , is among cinema’s great burdened souls. For Inside , Dafoe puts to work every angular muscle and wrinkle of his visage to unnerving effect. He’s the perfect lead for writer-director Vasilis Katsoupis’ resourceful and immersive survival tale, one that puts a gradually tortured protagonist through the wringer in unimaginable ways.

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In fact, Dafoe is pretty much the only character in this unexpectedly thrilling psychodrama, save for a maid that his character sees through the intercom of the luxury high-rise apartment he’s stuck in, and a poor pigeon with a grim fate as wretched as his. It all starts when Nemo (Dafoe), an agile and crafty art thief, swiftly enters the coldly chic and high-tech midtown Manhattan penthouse in question, home to a well-heeled artist with an impressive collection of artwork, from Egon Schiele to Francesco Clemente.

The drill is simple enough: Nemo needs to move quickly through the sparsely decorated, ultra-sophisticated space and collect the priceless works of art (authentic works gathered for the film by curator Leonardo Bigazzi) with the help of a voice on the other end of his walkie-talkie he calls Number 3. But when the apartment’s seemingly unbreakable security system malfunctions on Nemo’s way out, all possible avenues of exit are shut down and Number 3 vanishes, leaving Nemo abandoned inside an unfriendly space that’s unwilling to provide for his basic needs like food, water, and livable temperature levels.

While it’s a bit of a cliché to refer to a film location as a character in its own right, doing so for Inside is perhaps the only way to do justice to the level of heavy-lifting done by Thorsten Sabel’s ingenious production design in telling this story. Indeed, every part of the penthouse where the entirety of Inside unfolds is a tool in Ben Hopkins’ script (which was developed from an idea by Katsoupis). Broadly speaking, their joint effort resembles an escape room challenge or, more accurately, a quiet (and sometimes humorous) survival saga like All Is Lost where wealth and luxury (instead of mother nature) are the perilous sources of a hostile environment containing scores of priceless art that are as useful to Nemo as wads of cash would be to Robinson Crusoe on a desert island.

Still, that Nemo is an artist—at least twice, his voiceover tells us that his sketchbook is among his most-prized possessions—comes in handy to the lonesome fighter. Throughout Inside , he operates like an engineer-cum-installation artist, capable of building a makeshift escape ladder to the skylight of the apartment’s impossibly high ceilings. Before that, he carves a hole in a handsomely ornate wood door frame only to (expectedly) hit its steely foundation. Then he eliminates other escape options like trying to be heard or seen as he comes to realize that the wealth he’s encased in has made him inaccessible—as the owner of the space intended. So he breaks, destroys, unscrews, and mounts the furniture available to him, hoping to climb out of his spacious prison that gradually malfunctions with extreme hot and cold temperatures. To make matters worse, he has no water except for a timed indoor sprinkler and no food to speak of other than a few cans of innutritious food and some crackers.

Throughout this one-location nail-biter, you can unambiguously see the collaboration between Katsoupis, Hopkins and Sabel expanding the story’s scope in ways both economical and smart and with the backdrop of a distancing and icy Brutalist aesthetic. Also noteworthy is Bigazzi’s cohesiveness—the artworks he’s selected (especially a family photograph) focus on the eyes, creating a collectively spine-tingling sense that Nemo is constantly being watched from within.

As with most works of art, the message of Inside is in the eye of the beholder. It’s possible to read this original exercise as a critique of extreme wealth and pretentiousness in the art world, neither of which can nourish one’s body or save a human from their eventual demise. It’s also possible to get overwhelmed, bored or feel unmoved by the repetitiveness of it all as time and seasons pass, Nemo’s feces accumulates and the once stonily elegant flat becomes uninhabitable. This critic firmly leans towards the former reading—it is in fact admirable that Katsoupis leaves Inside open-ended without getting heavy-handed or preachy. Still, the greatest asset of the picture is Dafoe’s finesse in a part that’s both physically demanding and fiendishly fun to witness. It’s like someone dropped him in the middle of an antique shop with a baseball bat and said, “Go to town!” And that he does.

( Inside opens in theaters March 17)

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The Thief as Artist in “Inside”

By Anthony Lane

The hero of “Inside,” a new film directed by Vasilis Katsoupis, is apparently called Nemo, though I never caught the name. All I know is that he’s a thief, and that he’s played by Willem Dafoe . As the story commences, a helicopter deposits Nemo onto the roof of a tall building in New York. From the fact that the chopper is heard but not seen, you will gather that “Inside” is not blessed with an inexhaustible budget. Here is an art-house flick, cunningly coated in the gleam of a high-tech thriller.

And what an art house. Nemo breaks into a top-floor apartment, which looks more like a gallery than a home. It belongs to a man of evident wealth and slightly uncertain taste, who is away in Kazakhstan. Hanging on the walls—or, in the case of video installations, projected onto screens—are multiple works of modern art, mostly of recent vintage. The oldest are by Egon Schiele , and it is these that Nemo has come to steal, presumably so that they can be passed on to another Croesus. Swift and feline, Nemo gathers all but one of the Schieles and prepares to depart, whereupon the security system locks the doors and shuts him in. He must spend the rest of the film alone, aloft, unmissed, and unlamented. Think Rapunzel without the hair.

It’s not hard to spot the wily ways in which Katsoupis and his screenwriter, Ben Hopkins, rig the plot. The gas and the water have been switched off in the apartment, meaning that Nemo can’t cook any food or flush the toilet. The electricity, on the other hand, remains on, so he is able to admire a glowing blue neon sign—another piece of art—that reads “all the time that will come after this moment.” The fridge, too, is in use: there’s an amazing shot of Nemo, parched and desperate, inserting his head into the icebox and licking the chilly moisture from the sides. Oh, and the phone that connects him to the lobby of the building is out of order. Of course it is.

All of which suggests that “Inside” belongs with “ Castaway ” (2000), “The Martian” (2015), and other tales of solitary survival. Although Nemo is in the lap of luxury, snacking on truffle sauce and caviar from the fridge, the apartment is as imprisoning as Mars, and, being a resourceful fellow, he is determined to abscond. The only possible exit is a skylight, and the only means of reaching it is to build a tower from a bedstead and other bits of furniture. Standing atop his structure and chipping away at plaster, he needs something to protect his eyes, so he smashes a purple glass vase, picks out two curved shards, and binds them together with fabric. Voilà: a pair of makeshift goggles. The look is part handyman, part demon. Very cool, and very Dafoe.

What distinguishes Nemo from earlier Crusoes is that he’s not just an escape artist but an actual artist. In voice-over, he tells us that, as a child, he valued his sketchbooks above all else; now, in his compulsory lockdown, he begins to draw. Graphite sprinkles onto the floor, so he scoops it up, swishes it around his mouth, and spits on the wall, making a black splash—oral Action painting, you might say. Also, as if his tower had not sated his yen for construction, he conjures a sculpture of found materials: a form of altar, crowned with soft cushions and metal nuts. But who is worshipping whom? What’s going on?

Well, the movie is morphing. Much of it, in the first half, is funny, deft, and dotted with suspense. If the door of the fridge is left open, for example, the Macarena starts to play. (Nemo, initially vexed by this, gives in and dances along.) A young woman (Eliza Stuyck) employed as a cleaner in the building is oblivious of Nemo’s presence, yet he can observe her on CCTV. He names her Jasmine, and, at one lovely point, he watches her enjoying a quick cigarette and vacuuming the smoke from the air. Gradually, however, “Inside” grows heavy. The tread of the story slows; dream sequences intrude, to no effect; Nemo turns inward, courting madness; and we realize that Katsoupis is positioning his film as an exercise in performance art, to match the video installations and the other works. Notice the photograph of a man attached to a wall with duct tape. That is an untitled image by the waggish Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan , from 1999, and the poor guy being displayed, with a heretical hint of crucifixion, is a gallery owner from Milan—a kindred spirit for Nemo, who is equally stuck.

To a degree, this creative scheme makes sense. It certainly tallies with the singular career of Dafoe, whom we saw as the thieving Caravaggio, an Allied agent with missing thumbs, in “The English Patient” (1996); as van Gogh, in “At Eternity’s Gate” (2018); and, long ago, in “To Live and Die in L.A.” (1985), as a snaky villain and artist who sets fire to one of his own paintings, the better to concentrate on his skills as a master forger. The face is more graven these days, but the gnashing grin and the wry tone of his delivery are unchanged, as is Dafoe’s knack for wrong-footing us; his wicked characters are as hard to dislike as his virtuous ones are to trust. We instinctively believe in him as a maker of things, and “Inside” would have been implausible, or unbearable, with any other actor in the role. Life, in the hands of Dafoe, is an agonized game.

For Katsoupis, regrettably, agony wins the day. To furnish a movie with cultural props, however lavish, is not to confer an automatic gravity and heft; witness Nemo inching into a hidden passageway and discovering not just a Schiele self-portrait, from 1910, but an original copy of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” by William Blake, which Nemo then studies and recites. (The Blake is quite a coup, since only nine copies are known to exist.) Do the shenanigans of “Inside” keep honest company with such treasures? Should we bracket Dafoe, compellingly wiry as he is, with the acutely angled stiffness of the Schiele picture—the “enigmatic substances I am made of,” as the artist wrote in 1911? Not really. Give me the sharp wit of the movie’s early scenes, which are far more disrespectful: the enigma-free sight of Nemo, for instance, trying to crunch through a door and deploying “Paper Hat,” a bronze sculpture by Lynn Chadwick, as a crowbar . Who said art is no use?

Two ways to win the Cold War. Option one: a first strike, annihilating the Communist bloc’s arsenal of nuclear weapons before they can be launched in retaliation. Option two, no less fraught with risk: send nine white guys, including four horn players and a singer with a penchant for leather pants, to perform Grammy-winning rock and roll behind the Iron Curtain. It is this second course of action that was pursued in 1970, and that is investigated in a knotty new documentary, “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?”

Nobody would have asked that question in 1969, when “Blood, Sweat & Tears,” the second album by the group of the same name, was enthroned for weeks at the top of the charts. It’s a witches’ brew, kicking off with a riff on Erik Satie and marked by salvos of brass and mid-song shifts in tempo, but the director of the documentary, John Scheinfeld, doesn’t dive very deep into the music. Although he has made films about John Coltrane, John Lennon, and Harry Nilsson, what grips him here, understandably, is the particular summer when Blood, Sweat & Tears went on tour to Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland. It was a revelation, and a fall from grace.

Why did they go? Blackmail, of a sort. The lead vocalist, a Canadian named David Clayton-Thomas, had a voice of tremendous rasp and rumble. He sounded like a volcano making conversation. He was also in danger of losing his green card, and, to avoid that fate, the band’s manager struck a dark deal with the U.S. State Department, which wanted American performers who could spread the word, or the groove, behind enemy lines. So the band was dispatched to hot spots such as Zagreb (where the audience was sullenly unresponsive) and Warsaw (the opposite). Scariest of all was Bucharest, where the concert was officially deemed “too successful,” where cops with German shepherds were on hand to quash the crowd’s delight, where one enthusiast was taken away and beaten for requesting an autograph, and where “people don’t enjoy the privilege of spontaneous outburst,” as Clayton-Thomas reported, back in L.A. He added, “It’s given us all a new appreciation of various freedoms that we took for granted.”

That was true, but it was an unforgivable truth—anathema to those in the counterculture for whom America held a monopoly on repression. Blood, Sweat & Tears were reviled in the press as a “fascist rock band” in the making, and as “pig-collaborators” by Abbie Hoffman, who never had the pleasure of protesting in Bucharest. More than it knows, this movie is an engaging, and sometimes enraging, exposé of chronic insularity. (I suggest viewing it as an ironic footnote, or a bonus track, to “The Free World,” a consummate study of the period by my colleague Louis Menand.) One of the group’s biggest hits, “And When I Die,” contains the line “All I ask of living is to have no chains on me.” Look closely at the footage of the Romanian fans, at a gig, and you will see a pair of hands raised high in celebration. They are joined together by a chain. ♦

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‘Inside’ Review: Willem Dafoe Is Trapped in World’s Most Pretentious Penthouse

Kate erbland, editorial director.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. Focus Features releases the film in theaters on Friday, March 17.

We don’t learn the name of our protagonist until the final credits roll on Vasilis Katsoupis’ “ Inside .” It’s “Nemo,” perhaps picked to conjure a spirit of adventure, but this Nemo isn’t traveling under the sea or to an island, this one is trapped in a claustrophobic nightmare, one spent entirely with the art-lover-turned-thief in the world’s most pretentious (and deadly?) penthouse. There, he is forced to use all his wits (and priceless works of art) to survive a waking nightmare.

It’s a natty-enough twist on the survivor story — what if you were stuck inside , not  outside? — and one bolstered by the inherent watchability of star Willem Dafoe , one of the few performers absolutely up to the task of this particular feature. But that twist and this performance only go far, as “Inside” soon turns from clever questions to muddled answers, ending on the oddest possible note for a film that opened with such promise.

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Nemo tells us “Art is for keeps” via an opening voiceover that will reappear later in a much different guise. Even as we spend nearly two hours almost entirely in his solitary company, this is about as much as we’ll learn about his worldview and life philosophy. Nemo fancies himself an aesthete, but he’s also a zippy thief. As he sweeps through the ritzy NYC apartment in search of four Egon Schiele paintings, he scarcely stops to look at other works. He’s a man on a mission.

But when Nemo enters the exit code into the handy-dandy security tablet, the system cues up blaring alarms, flashing lights, and a mechanical voice announcing a “system malfunction.” A partner on the other end of his walkie-talkie bails instantly, never to be heard from again.

The noise and the lights are bad enough, but the real problems are only starting: There’s no gas or water, the HVAC system is pushing out deadly heat or freezing AC, and he’s trapped. What’s a guy to do?

With the limited information on hand, audiences will fixate on small missteps (just as Nemo will become obsessed with everything from a dying pigeon on the terrace to licking the inside of the freezer for condensation). Wouldn’t someone as rich as the penthouse’s owner have a crack security team on hand to answer the alarm? Shouldn’t someone be swinging by to feed those pricey exotic fish? Why is the pantry under lock and key? Why does Nemo so quickly give up on repairing the tablet? Some of those answers can be chalked up to that glitchy alarm system, but many of them seem to be the product of loose scripting from Ben Hopkins.

When Nemo attempts to engineer an escape, some of his ideas are wildly inventive. He manufactures a pair of goggles to protect his eyes, figures out how to make pasta without hot water. Other big swings (like that he’ll just scream really loudly and hope to be found?) seem like the result of iffy scripting rather than a dumb character. Along the way, cinematographer Steve Annis finds true beauty in the most benign of moments, thanks to close-ups of everything from the sweat dripping down Nemo’s neck to a thrilling shot from inside that damn freezer as Nemo licks it dry.

Nemo eventually crumbles — and who crumbles as compellingly as Dafoe? — which allows more flexibility in judging this glitchy (sorry) screenplay. Long stretches go by without Nemo uttering a word, though Hopkins does find a smart way to get his main character to engage with others, as he fixates on the only TV channel: a closed-circuit station that shows live video feeds around the building.

As time passes, things don’t just get more disgusting (the state of the penthouse, Nemo’s shrinking frame, the literal pile of shit in a bathtub that’s come to be used a toilet), but more wretched . Katsoupis and Hopkins use that to interrogate the possibility of a religious conversion for the ruined thief, but that’s so much less interesting than the blunter observations that unfold earlier.

For a film so fixated on art — expensive art, crazy art, serious art — “Inside” abandons its most compelling queries too quickly. What good is any of this art in the face of real necessity? By the time Nemo uses a priceless statue to pry open a door, his conversion seems obvious; once he takes another and folds it up into a tent, it’s complete. It’s also far too blunt, just like “Inside.” Real art asks questions, it doesn’t answer them in the plainest possible terms.

“Inside” premiered at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival. Focus Features will release it in theaters on Friday, March 17.

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What's the purpose of art? The most cynical among us might say it's to be used for tax evasion maneuvers, money laundry, and as investment assets for the wealthy – and we wouldn't be wrong. But there's also an undeniable force that pulls us all into creating meaning. Creation fascinates humans, from the most successful artists to a kid scrabbling a notebook. Still, when pushed to the brink of existence and forced to fight for survival, can we keep finding a reason for art to exist? Starring Willem Dafoe as art thief Nemo, Vasilis Katsoupis ’ Inside is deeply concerned with these questions, while still managing to fit a complex discussion in the middle of a thriller that's equally tense and entertaining.

Inside follows Nemo as he's sent to steal some expensive artwork from the well-secured New York flat of an art collector. Unfortunately for Nemo, the apartment's security system goes haywire before he gets out with the loot, sealing every exit shut with unbreakable glass and thick metal locks. Ultimately, the robbery gone wrong condemns Nemo to a challenging stay inside a concrete cage. Nemo's support team abandons the thief as soon as things go south. And since the flat is more of a personal gallery than a living space, there's no way of telling when the apartment's owner might return. So, alone, trapped, and with no means of communicating with the outside, Nemo must figure out how to survive long enough so he can manage to escape.

It's easy to approach Inside as yet another pandemic-inspired film that shows the dangers of isolation. All the main elements of this growing subgenre are there, including Nemo's slow descent into madness as he's deprived of any human contact. But it would be a mistake to condense the movie into a single note, as Inside is, above all, about the intrinsic connection between art and the human desire to exist beyond the confines of time.

RELATED: 'Manodrome' Review: Jesse Eisenberg Struggles With Inner Rage in Raw Deconstruction of Masculinity | Berlinale 2023

In Inside , Nemo tries to do whatever he can to stay alive, as would anyone else. Because as much as we are used to the everyday comforts of our lives, there's also primal energy pushing us to survive, making death and oblivion the biggest enemies of the human spirit. Pulling through won't be easy, though, as Nemo must get creative to find food, water, and shelter from a climate control that alternates between trying to cook and freeze the thief. That means Inside turns Nemo into the manifestation of human endurance, thrilling the audience as he beats the odds and keeps stretching his life, one day at a time. Katsoupis abuses close-up to show the details of Nemo’s suffering and grit, letting viewers observe drops of sweat running down Dafoe’s back or the actor’s lips cracking due to the extreme temperatures. In Inside , Dafoe’s body becomes the center of the movie’s bizarre art exposition as the ultimate representation of what the human will can achieve.

In Nemo’s dire situation, the priceless objects of art and decoration spread everywhere in the flat lose meaning. A short narration in Inside ’s introduction underlines how Nemo recognizes the value of art as a projection of human perseverance. Nevertheless, when faced with death, Nemo won't hesitate to tear the flat apart, stripping art of its contemplative nature to turn it into a pragmatic survival tool. This destructive process is mesmerizing, as it reveals how even the most priceless work of art can be reduced to just a piece of metal, tissue, or paper, ready to feed Nemo's creativity as he tries to find emergency exits. On the threshold of existence, Nemo exposes the harsh truth that art, in itself, has no purpose, at least in the most material sense of the word.

Still, Inside doesn’t allow itself to offer catharsis by destroying rich people’s properties. The movie wants to take one step further and show how art is not obsolete. As he spends his days alone in the flat, Nemo still takes time to draw the things and people he sees through windows and cameras, using pen and paper to process his need for human affection. He also turns the fruits of his labor into pieces of altars and finds levity through rituals that only make sense as prolongations of his interior universe. In short, while Nemo is destroying the cold and static works of art he finds in the flat, he’s also creating art as an extension of his mind, leaving behind traces of his existence that will survive long after his flesh perishes. And that’s the true beauty of Inside , as the thriller becomes both a story about Nemo’s survival instincts and his desire to make art.

Art, as an object, doesn’t have a purpose. Art, as a testament to humanity's unique ability to cheat death, gives meaning to our fragile lives.

Inside can be approached by people looking for a new confinement thriller but willing to overthink its philosophy. But it also can give people interested in art many fresh and exciting ideas to discuss. Everything is glued together by another Dafoe performance that proves he’s one of the greatest actors of all time, especially when given enough room to tap into the lunacy of his characters. In short, Katsoupis managed to craft a crowd pleaser that still has something interesting to say.

Inside had its world premiere at 2023’s Berlin Film Festival.

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Inside Review

Willem dafoe can’t save this scattered one-location thriller..

With an intriguing set up, Vasilis Katsoupis’ Inside features a captivating performance by Willem Dafoe as an art thief trapped in a billionaire’s penthouse. However, its unfocused use of space, plot, and theme render it mostly dull until it eventually peters out instead of offering any kind of discernible ending, let alone a cathartic one. Whatever it hopes to say about the meaning of art and materialism it says in scattered spurts which rarely add up to a satisfying whole. It approaches its one-location survival story much the same way, leading to similar results.

Set in a New York skyrise, Inside casts Dafoe as Nemo, one member of an otherwise-unseen heist crew, and a character whose opening voiceover hints at his undying love of paintings. This gives him something of a personal connection, at least in theory, to the numerous works of art he’s been sent to steal, when – with help of his cohorts over walkie talkies – he breaks into an enormous luxury apartment while its haughty owner is overseas for several months. Things go awry, and Nemo is unable to either exit the penthouse or call for help, leaving him trapped in a high-tech prison that slowly begins to fail him.

Katsoupis and screenwriter Ben Hopkins are adept at setting up physical hurdles, just as Dafoe is stellar at portraying subtle annoyance that eventually turns into desperation the longer he’s indoors. Food and water are limited, and Nemo must contend with the absurdity of “ Macarena ” blaring over loudspeakers each time he opens the scantly stocked refrigerator – one of just a few effective comedic gags.

However, once Inside lays its roadmap of potential hurdles, from dwindling supplies and broken plumbing to a thermostat on the fritz, it rarely returns its focus to any of these issues as continued problems. Instead, the edit (by Lambis Haralambidis) treats them merely as tidbits of information – the kind which you might recall and wonder about once they’ve been off-screen for lengthy periods – rather than as evolving elements of Nemo’s confining environment. Inside’s structure is almost too mechanical to leave a lasting impact; dramatic hurdles, like a lack of proper toilet facilities or dental hygiene, are set up clearly, but Inside’s idea of “payoff” simply means a single shot to get us up to speed on these problems once time has passed. It has little sense of continuity in between, rendering it less of an ongoing story and more of a checklist.

What's your favorite single-location film?

The passage of time in Inside is yet another oddity. While it’s unclear just how long Nemo spends in this apartment – the seasons change enough outside the window that it’s conceivably several months – there’s little care for what time actually feels like for its protagonist, and how it stretches or contracts from his point of view. It’s simply another logistical screenplay element unfolding in the background rather than something experienced through human eyes, or through its toll on the human form. Dafoe’s performance is physically painstaking and emotionally introspective as Nemo is driven further into isolation. However, few filmmaking elements complement his work.

It’s hard not to think of Inside as a pandemic lockdown movie in spirit, one meant to reflect familiar frustrations and feelings of isolation; Nemo even finds comfort in people-watching, by tuning into live security footage of people all around the building. However, cinematographer Steve Annis’ camera rarely works in tandem with the space to enhance Nemo’s emotions or his physical experience. The penthouse seldom feels uncomfortable; it’s shot neither claustrophobically, like its walls are closing in, nor like its emptiness is truly vast.

Inside Photos

The soundscape does, on occasion, enhance the idea that Nemo might slowly be losing his mind, but Katsoupis and Hopkins’ conception of this idea never comes to fruition beyond fleeting phantasmagorical imagery. We see the outside effects, but we’re never allowed a window into Nemo’s psychology; we see the “what” of his fractured visions, but Inside is rarely concerned with presenting them in a manner that suggests a “why.” Dafoe’s frequent voiceover (and even his spoken lines, to no one in particular) often hints at scattered thoughts about modern art, both as status symbols and things which people may hold personally dear. In fact, one of the paintings Nemo is sent to steal happens to be an expensive self-portrait, which inherently rides the lines between these two outlooks. However, this tension never comes to the fore, no matter how long Nemo spends watching and considering the art around him – or creating his own, whether in the form of ritual as he slips into a more primal existence, or by repurposing furniture to build enormous structures in the hopes of reaching a vent in the ceiling.

Despite having numerous paintings and sculptures scattered across its space, and despite its character frequently alluding to deeper artistic thoughts and feelings, Inside has little to no perspective on modern art. And yet, it spends so much of its 105-minute runtime ruminating on the subject that it leaves little room to establish the urgency of Nemo’s situation the further it goes on.

It may recall other films which are similar in concept, like Danny Boyle’s wilderness-survival drama 127 Hours, or more pertinently, Vikramaditya Motwane’s Trapped, a 2017 Indian thriller also featuring a character stuck in a high-rise apartment. But these comparisons feel almost unfair, since both Boyle and Motwane quickly and effectively establish a balance between the characters themselves and the stakes of their respective situations. Katsoupis, in contrast, struggles to visually string together the handful of ideas that make up Hopkins’ already scattered screenplay, yielding a story that buckles under the weight of its faux-profound ending, which not only lacks momentum, but meaning. The result is a film that you could narrate or re-edit in practically any order, but no matter what, it would be just as plain.

Despite Willem Dafoe’s powerful acting work as an art thief trapped in a luxurious penthouse, Inside offers little by way of insight into its main character, his surroundings, or the scenario in which he finds himself. It features several interesting ideas – in theory, at least – about art and the material world, but no two of them are strung together with anything resulting in intriguing imagery, propulsive stakes, or meaningful human drama.

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'Inside': Willem Dafoe dominates this thriller. Good, because it would be awful without him

Willem Dafoe is a great actor, legendarily intense and committed to his roles.

If you need a reminder, “Inside” is the movie for you. It’s all Dafoe, all the time — basically a one-man show, with the exception of some brief dream sequences — and he is customarily all in on his performance.

The film itself, directed by Vasilis Katsoupis, is similarly intense but not as appealing; without an actor like Dafoe at its center (and margins and everywhere else), it would be unwatchable torture. With him, it’s more like watchable torture, easier to admire than enjoy.

Dafoe plays Nemo, a thief dropped off by helicopter at a luxury New York penthouse apartment, stocked to the gills with museum-quality modern art. Not just any thief, Nemo, he graces us with a VoiceOver introduction where he recalls a teacher’s question when he was a child: If your house was burning down, what would you save?

He went with the cat, an AC/DC CD and his sketchbook.

“Cats die,” he says. “Music fades. But art is for keeps.”

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What is 'Inside' about? It's simple. And not

But who gets to keep it? Whatever the case, Nemo is in walkie-talkie contact with “Number 3,” an unseen partner who relays codes and messages to help him navigate the apartment.

Nemo is briefly concerned when one of the pieces they’ve targeted isn’t where it should be. But he has bigger problems ahead. An exit code proves wonky and shuts down the apartment, locking Nemo in. (Number 3, not exactly a chapter entry in “Profiles in Courage,” bails immediately. “You’re on your own” is his inspiring sign-off.)

What’s more, the computer-controlled systems in the apartment crash. So there’s no water from the tap. And the temperature inside begins rising to Phoenix-in-summer levels. (Later it will plunge to frigid levels.)

What follows is Nemo’s attempt to survive inside well-appointed luxury, which suddenly has become as dangerous and forbidding as the middle of the desert (or, depending, Antarctica). The refrigerator still works but is barely stocked (and plays “Macarena” if you leave the door ajar too long).

There are a couple of fish tanks — perhaps you can guess where that is leading — as well as a small pool. There is a small amount of food, mostly snacks, like moldy bread and a tin of caviar, a combo no foodie saw coming. A watering system for the indoor plants proves useful.

Attempts to chop his way out of the ornate wooden front door do not work. Nor does trying to toss heavy artwork through the windows, which are unbreakable.

He watches the multi-feed security camera until he’s on a first-name basis with the maid who can’t hear his shouts. He hosts his own imaginary cooking show. And he begins to see art as utilitarian, not so much by choice as necessity.

Nemo also begins to create his own art. Some of his psychic adventures seem to suggest a descent into madness, but he remains committed to using the pricey furniture to build a tower to try to get to the skylight in the high ceiling, a possible means of escape.

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Here's the real statement 'Inside' makes

Katsoupis, who is credited for the idea (Ben Hopkins wrote the script), doubtless wants to say something profound about the value of art here. About who should have it? About its value? About its meaning in a world in which its value is fuel or as a tool?

It’s muddled. But he inadvertently has made a statement about art anyway — the art of acting. By unleashing Dafoe’s talent on what essentially becomes a horror story of entrapment and escape, he allows the actor artistry to overwhelm the rest of his message. If that’s an accident, at least it’s a happy one.

Are these the 100 greatest movies ever? See if you agree with this Arizona author

'Inside' 3 stars

Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★

Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★

Director: Vasilis Katsoupis.

Cast: Willem Dafoe.

Rating: R for language, some sexual content and nude images.

How to watch: In theaters March 17.

The Ending Of 2023's Inside Explained

"Inside," the latest film from director Vasilis Katsoupis, sees an art thief's simple heist take a horrific turn. The film follows seasoned burglar Nemo (Willem Dafoe) as he attempts to steal art from a wealthy man's (Gene Bervoets) luxurious penthouse. Unfortunately, after the penthouse's security system malfunctions, all the exits lock and the temperature system fluctuates between boiling hot and frigid cold. Nemo becomes trapped in a slow-growing nightmare and must use the resources around him to find an escape before his sanity drains completely.

Dafoe is known for tapping into a wild and crazed side of himself, and that's exactly what he brings to "Inside." As Nemo spends more time in his luxurious hell, it's clear that his grip on reality is slipping and he is forced to take some drastic measures to survive. 

"Inside" not only shocks and horrifies viewers through Dafoe's performance and what he's forced to endure — it also hooks them through its unique survival situation. There's something captivating about watching Nemo attempt to use what's around him to stay alive. However, the film can lose viewers a bit when it drifts into Nemo's distorted psyche and the more dreamlike nature of his horrors. With that in mind, let's delve into everything that happens throughout "Inside" — especially its climatic final moments. 

A bad situation

While there are worse places to be trapped than in a luxurious penthouse, Nemo's situation is still pretty awful since the owner doesn't really take care of this place. The food that Nemo finds is incredibly minimal and what he does find is generally covered with mold. Seriously, the mold problem is so bad that he comes across oranges that are as hard as a rock. He even tries to break the windows with them, but to no avail. Eventually, he's able to find a pantry with some food, but with no running gas or water, he's forced to use unconventional ways of cooking — which doesn't result in the tastiest meals. 

With no running water, Nemo also can't use conventional toilets and is forced to make his own latrine, which surely makes the place smell awful. The windows also seem unbreakable since Nemo makes multiple attempts at breaking them but is unable to even cause a crack. Worst of all, though, is that the temperature system is slowly rising and decreasing in the penthouse. This means that Nemo is forced to deal with unbearably hot and cold temperatures, which really starts to weigh on him as time goes on. 

Although Nemo seems to be surrounded by a sense of luxury and wealth that most would enjoy, it ultimately becomes a nightmare for him and a surprisingly tough survival situation. 

No help out there

Even though Nemo arrives at the penthouse with two cohorts, they quickly abandon him when things turn sideways. Number 2 (voiced by Vincent Eaton) quickly disappears after the alarm is raised, and Number 3 (voiced by Andrew Blumenthal) tells Nemo that he is on his own. Nemo tries to contact them until his radio dies, but he never receives a response. There are times when he can hear a helicopter flying by and likely hopes that it's Number 2 trying to save him, but that never happens. 

For the most part, Nemo is totally alone in this situation and only has a few moments where he could possibly get help. Nemo slowly becomes obsessed with some of the people he sees on a security feed for the building — especially a housekeeper named Jasmine (Eliza Stuyck). Any time she comes just outside the front door, Nemo tries his best to cause a big enough commotion to get her attention. Unfortunately, she's always listening to music and the door is so thick that she can never hear him. 

In the end, there simply isn't much help out there for Nemo and he's forced to rely on his own skills to survive. 

Nemo's survival

While Nemo might come off as just a simple art thief, he's actually got some survival skills that are pretty impressive. Using some bowls and the plants' sprinkler system, Nemo is able to create a consistent water source for himself. He's smartly able to remove the mold off of some of the food and find new ways to cook food without running water or gas. It doesn't taste great, but if it keeps him alive then Nemo will do whatever it takes. 

As for escape plans, Nemo continually works on one idea and it's fascinating to watch. He utilizes all the furniture to build a tower so that he can reach a skylight to try and remove one of the glass panels. It's pretty funny how Nemo uses glass shards to make goggles and turns wooden chair legs into wrenches, but it shows how resourceful and smart he can be as a survivalist. 

Nemo's determination to live is what drives the entire film and he shows some very impressive skills that help him survive and even thrive in this bizarre survival setting. 

The room behind the walls

While Nemo is searching through different parts of the penthouse, he eventually finds a hidden room behind a coat cabinet that leads to a room behind the walls. The area is incredibly narrow and has a strange-colored light illuminating the entire hallway. As Nemo first goes into it, he spots the self-portrait painting he struggled to find when he was stealing the art and suddenly suffers a headache while looking at it. After he's able to compose himself, he goes deeper into the area and finds another room with the self-portrait and something super creepy. 

Nemo finds the body of the owner sprawled out like a corpse in a morgue. However, it's not the actual owner, it's just a rubber body that's likely been placed there as an art piece or simply to freak out intruders. Nemo isn't phased much by the fake body and takes the self-portrait back with him into the rest of the penthouse. 

Given how valuable the self-portrait is said to be, it makes sense that Nemo couldn't find it when he first searched the penthouse, but at least if he's able to escape he'll have the painting with him. Plus, Nemo also finds a book about heaven and hell that slowly starts to seep into his mind — something that plays a big role in some of the delusions he has later in the film. 

Dreams and hallucinations

As Nemo's situation becomes more hopeless and he starts to suffer from health problems due to his lack of nutrition, he begins experiencing dangerous dreams and hallucinations. After falling asleep one night, Nemo has a dream that he's in one of the owner's gallery shows. There's a sense of frustration that can be felt within Nemo in this setting and he abruptly leaves while the owner is talking to the guests. 

Nemo also has some more frightening moments where he fantasizes that Jasmine has come into the penthouse and starts having a very sensual interaction with him. It's a moment where Nemo is clearly drained mentally and his loneliness is getting to him. 

The most horrifying fantasy, though, comes when Nemo is dealing with some of the tooth decay he's developed from his poor nutrition and he suddenly sees the owner behind him. His head then slams into the counter and he awakes to find that he's still the only one there. Nemo's mind has clearly started to slip from reality and it's not too long until his weakened mental state mixes with his current readings about heaven and hell, which makes him begin to display some eerie behavior. 

A great fall

Nemo's big plan to try and escape through a skylight hits a big snag when something absolutely gut-wrenching happens to him while on top of the structure he built. As Nemo starts to unscrew some of the bolts holding the glass panel up, he slips and tumbles all the way down the structure. Luckily, the structure doesn't collapse as he falls, but Nemo suffers a grave injury that could stop his escape plans altogether. Nemo's leg has a very deep cut on it and he's suffered a bad fracture or possibly even a broken bone. 

Frankly, this plan already suffered quite a few setbacks. Nemo exhausts a lot of energy putting this structure together and after initially getting past the easily broken outer frame, he comes across metal bolts that he can't get off. This entire plan has already been a big pain for Nemo; now that he's broken his leg, all hope is lost. 

Nemo's great fall might as well also be the start of his massive descent into madness since it's where the film starts to see him become truly unhinged. 

There's a moment when Nemo sees a light reflection on a wall and becomes transfixed by it. He starts to draw some disturbing abstract imagery around it and creates a shrine to it using some of the things he's come across. From the rock-hard oranges to the valuable self-portrait, the shrine is almost like a culmination of everything that Nemo has had to deal with in his journey. Before you know it, Nemo is sitting in front of the shrine dressed in some strange clothes praying to it. 

As Nemo has become obsessed with texts that talk about heaven and hell, it's tough to say if he believes there's some type of entity that will help him move out of this nightmare or if he's totally lost it at this point. However, Nemo has clearly hit rock bottom and his delusions about death are unnerving to see. Still, he's not completely broken yet. While his mind is waning by the minute, he comes up with one last attempt to try and escape. 

One last attempt

Nemo is nearly at his breaking point when he suddenly finds one last thing that could alert others. Upon looking up at the ceiling in one of the rooms, Nemo notices a smoke alarm and thinks of a way to set it off. By using shredded pieces of paper from books scattered around the penthouse and reflecting the light onto them, Nemo is able to create fire. He then uses a torch to take the fire and put it next to the smoke alarm. 

The fire instantly sets off the alarm and then the sprinkler system that extinguishes the flames. Unfortunately, no one comes to save him. It's actually stunning how isolated this penthouse is and no one even calls the fire department to help Nemo. It's a mind-blowing moment that solidifies how hopeless Nemo's situation is and, oddly enough, the sprinkler system only makes things worse. 

Drowning in sorrow

Nemo's plan to alert people through the fire alarm fails, and you would think that would be enough of a problem for him. Sadly, it gets worse as the sprinkler system starts to flood the place. The torrential downpour even cuts Nemo off from the things that helped him stay sane, as the security feed that lets Nemo see the rest of the building is shut off after the TV gets too wet. The video room screening some kind of movie on repeat is shut off as well. Also, Nemo is left completely soaking wet and all the materials he could use for escape suffer severe water damage. 

It's honestly surprising that Nemo's escape structure stays intact because the water is beating down on everything. There's a shot where Nemo is sitting defeated during this horrific indoor storm and it's a perfect culmination of his feelings at the moment. He once again feels terribly hopeless about things and is now literally drowning in his sorrows. The sprinkler system eventually stops, but the entire sequence feels like a dagger to the heart. 

Nemo's final message

Sometime later, Nemo has really hit his breaking point but finds some clarity. He decides that before making one last attempt to get the skylight off, he's going to leave the owner a message. The narration from the opening of Nemo talking about his love of art and what he would save from a fire replays over a scene of him writing a message on the wall. However, this time it leads into his new message to the owner. He apologizes to the owner for destroying his home and attempting to steal from him. However, he also mentions that he saved three pieces of art — likely the three he was going to steal. 

More importantly, Nemo mentions that destroying the penthouse was possibly a good thing since — as Nemo explains — there is no creation without destruction. Perhaps he's talking about himself at this moment since he now has a new perspective on things from this journey of survival, or perhaps it's an artistic jab at the owner for not taking care of this place whatsoever and collecting art without much meaning behind it. Either way, these final words from Nemo act as a fitting goodbye to this place before he tries to ascend through the skylight. 

Nemo's fate

Nemo's mind is made up on escaping, so he heads up his structure to the skylight and begins to pry off the glass panel. Eventually, he's able to get it off and we see it crash down to the ground. However, Nemo's fate is left kind of a mystery since we never actually see him climb up the skylight and escape. Rather, the final shot of the film shows the empty room with the skylight radiating a harmonious light into the room. This means that there are multiple ways to view this ending. 

The first is the most simple — Nemo escapes out of the skylight and either gets rescued or suffers the same fate as the pigeon did outside the window. The other is that maybe this ending is meant to represent his death and ascension to a higher power. Frankly, it seemed like Nemo was initially going up there just to put himself out of his misery, so a more tragic ending isn't too far-fetched. 

However, it's most likely that Nemo does escape since the panel crashes to the ground and Nemo would definitely take the opportunity to escape. While we don't actually see it, Nemo seemingly escapes this nightmare and leaves with new perspectives he couldn't have expected to gain walking in. 

Could there be a sequel?

So will there be a sequel? Since there is no sequel currently announced for "Inside" and the ending is pretty conclusive, it's safe to say that there will be no sequel for "Inside." However, that doesn't mean there couldn't be one! While Nemo's story might be closed and shut, someone else could easily fall into the same situation and go through their own horrifying journey of survival. 

Frankly, it would be pretty cool to see "Inside" become an anthology film series focused on people getting stuck in unique survival situations and having their physical and mental will be tested. It could easily act as a great spotlight series for actors with distinctive talents like Dafoe. "Inside" could have the potential for more, but with the film's small scale and indie audience, "Inside" is likely a one-and-done experience — unless the film becomes a cult hit.

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘Inside’: A gilded cage, with only art for company

Willem Dafoe stars in an art-house survival thriller that poses an intriguing question: What good is art if you can’t eat it?

Imagine “ The Martian ” — the 2015 Oscar-nominated survival drama starring Matt Damon as an astronaut who must use his wits to survive after he is stranded on the Red Planet — except this time the story takes place in an unoccupied luxury penthouse in Manhattan. The hero? An aesthete/art thief (Willem Dafoe) who has accidentally locked himself inside the place, with little besides the owner’s art collection to keep him company. That, at least, is the bare bones of the movie “Inside.”

But the film ups the ante on the conventional survival-thriller genre of “ Cast Away ” and its ilk by posing an intriguing question: If you can’t eat, drink or wear art — if its pleasures and purpose are purely aesthetic at minimum, and spiritual at best — what earthly good is it? It’s a question that, under the circumstances of the film, is far from rhetorical.

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Dafoe plays a burglar named Nemo (Latin for “no one”) in the heady narrative debut of Greek filmmaker Vasilis Katsoupis, working from a screenplay by Ben Hopkins. In the opening minutes, Nemo breaks into the residence of an unnamed Pritzker Prize-winning architect easily enough, looking primarily for a self-portrait by Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918), valued at $3 million. Instead, he initially finds only plenty of other, more contemporary works: Adrian Paci’s “Temporary Reception Center,” a still from a video of refugees lined up on airport ramp stairs; a watercolor nude by Francesco Clemente, commissioned specifically for the film; photographic documentation of Maurizio Cattelan’s 1999 installation piece, in which the artist temporarily duct-taped art dealer Massimo De Carlo to a gallery wall; and a neon sculpture by David Horvitz that reads, “All the time that will come after this moment.”

Among the names included in the closing credits — what the film calls the “Inside Art Collection” — are Joanna Piotrowska , Petrit Halilaj and other emerging artists.

None of it is mere set dressing. The movie has its own curator: Leonardo Bigazzi from the Florence-based organization Fondazione In Between Art Film , which explores the dialogue between the disciplines of moving and still images.

The allusions to crucifixion, martyrdom, entrapment, escape, time and eternity are fully intentional. A security system kicks in when Nemo tries to leave with his loot, imprisoning him. The rest of the film, which seems to transpire over weeks, if not months, consists of the protagonist trying to survive or get out. He screams to attract the attention of an oblivious maid (Eliza Stuyck) in the hallway outside the fortresslike front door. He constructs a mountain of furniture to reach an impossibly high skylight.

In between, Nemo talks to himself a little — the dialogue is sparse — at times musing on the nature and value of beauty. Since the plumbing isn’t working for some reason, he drinks water from sprinklers meant to feed the houseplants. He eats whatever he can scrounge up, including, at one point, tropical fish. And he evacuates his bowels into a cistern sunken in the middle of the living room.

Making matters worse, Nemo has somehow broken the apartment’s temperature control touch panel, so the climate fluctuates between 106 and 43 degrees. When Nemo holds open the door of the “smart” refrigerator for more than 20 seconds to cool down, it automatically plays “Macarena.”

It’s enough to drive anyone insane.

We already know from “ The Lighthouse ” and “ At Eternity’s Gate ” that Dafoe excels at this sort of thing (movies about isolation, madness and art, that is). And “Inside” — more art-house drama than thriller — is cut from that same cloth. Its fascination, if that’s the right word, is with existential questions, not engineering ones.

“Inside” is a one-man show. Its rewards — such as they are, in this bleakly depressing thought exercise — will depend entirely on your appreciation of its star. Is it entertaining? Nemo has only art for company. We at least have Willem Dafoe.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong language, some sexual material and nude images. 105 minutes.

Screen Rant

Inside review: willem dafoe is perfectly unhinged in surprising survival drama.

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On the surface, the idea of being trapped inside a luxury apartment sounds like a glorious dream. Situated well above the unending bustle of New York City, surrounded by high-end art and top-of-the-line amenities, who could possibly complain about that? In director Vasilis Katsoupis' new feature Inside , this premise becomes a nightmare for Willem Dafoe's unlucky thief. What first seems to be the height of wealth and comfort becomes a deeply unsettling prison that only gets more haunting as the film goes on. Inside is unfortunately a bit too long for its own good, though Dafoe gives a knockout performance in what is essentially a one-man show.

The Oscar-nominated actor plays Nemo, an art thief backed by some unknown associates who help him gain access to an airy, ultra-modern high-rise penthouse. Nemo slips through the apartment with ease, getting most of the pieces he's come to nab before heading to the front door to make his exit. However, a malfunction with the security system instead leaves Nemo stranded on his own, with no way of getting out or contacting his allies. To make matters worse, there is minimal food, the water and gas have been turned off, and a broken thermostat leaves temperatures swinging from dangerously hot to distressingly cold. Nemo must rely on all of his smarts in order to survive his surprisingly inhospitable surroundings, even as his mind begins to unravel.

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A movie like Inside would not work without an extremely committed actor at its center, and Dafoe gives his all in depicting Nemo's gradual descent into madness. Of course, one expects no less of the man who is known for unhinged characters, but Dafoe is working with some unique challenges here. The dialogue is sparse, with Nemo only talking to himself more and more as the film goes on. The actor instead conveys Nemo's desperation through physical means; one particularly arresting moment sees the thief rest his head inside the freezer. Dafoe eagerly scrapes the sides, desperate for some kind of liquid, before resting his head on his arm and quietly breaking down. To that end, Inside is an incredible showcase for Dafoe's talents.

Katsoupis lends the film a great sense of space. The apartment itself, strikingly rendered by production designer Thorsten Sabel, becomes a character in and of itself, and Katsoupis is careful to capture as many details within it as possible. Weaving static shots into the action, the director, along with DOP Steven Annis, takes note of the bare-bones fridge, the growing pile of wood chippings on the floor (courtesy of Nemo trying to carve his way out of the heavy front door), and other increasingly disgusting elements of Nemo's horrible circumstances. For example, the lack of a working toilet is a detail that comes back as a devastating reminder that Nemo might be in a fancy apartment, but he might as well be on a deserted island —that would actually be a better situation.

As Inside gets further along, though, its compelling premise grows stale. There's only so much time an audience can watch a man struggle to survive in one place. At a certain point, the movie is simply wallowing in Nemo's insanity. Katsoupis (who came up with the story that screenwriter Ben Hopkins then fashioned into a script) doesn't shy away from the difficult things Nemo must resort to in order to survive, which makes for an increasingly trying viewing experience. Inside offers a break from Nemo's solitary existence with a brief dream sequence that, while padding the runtime even further, also hints at the life Nemo might've wished he could have, but now seems farther away than ever. The ending offers an ambiguous note of hope, though it isn't quite enough to erase the misery that came before.

As an exploration of a man's survival efforts and a demonstration of Dafoe's talent , Inside more than gets the job done. Nemo's ingenuity has been proved extensively by the time the credits roll, and Dafoe has definitely added another defining performance to his filmography. When it comes to the overall narrative and its urgency, Inside wavers a bit more. This movie won't be for everyone, but Dafoe enthusiasts will have to check out his go-for-broke depiction of a man at his wits' end. It keeps the movie exciting even when the pacing falters.

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Inside releases in theaters Friday, March 17. It is 105 minutes long and rated R for language, some sexual content, and nude images.

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Inside review: a dour, ill-conceived psychological drama

“Inside is an ambitious but ultimately ineffective psychological drama.”

• Willem Dafoe's go-for-broke solo performance
• An effectively disorienting pace
• A meandering, overlong story
• A disappointing lack of tension throughout
• A lackluster conclusion

Inside is a thoroughly unpleasant film. That isn’t a bug so much as it is a feature, though. The film, which comes from director Vasilis Katsoupis and writer Ben Hopkins, is a self-contained descent into the mind of one man who finds himself trapped in the most absurdly suffocating, bourgeoisie of settings. Despite what its trailers might have you believe, Inside isn’t much of a thriller, either. The film is, instead, a test of not only its character’s patience, but also the audience’s. For nearly two hours, Katsoupis and Hopkins ask you to sit by and watch as one trapped art thief is forced to lower himself to his most animalistic standards in order to survive.

Inside is, in other words, a cinematic endurance test. Its displays of filth and madness grow over the course of its story until they reach such absurd lows that they’ll have you questioning what the point of any of it was in the first place. Unfortunately, Inside fails to offer a satisfying answer to that question. In fact, outside of the commendable, go-for-broke performance at the center of it, there’s not much about Inside that’s worth recommending. The film is ultimately just as shallow as the ankle-high pond that sits at the center of the New York City penthouse apartment where Inside ’s story unfolds.

The film, to either its credit or its fault, tries to keep the surface-level depth of its story hidden for as long as possible. The drama’s opening minutes set it up to be the kind of bare-bones, but efficient heist-gone-wrong thriller that it most definitely is not. Over the course of its prologue, viewers watch as the film’s central art thief, Nemo (Willem Dafoe), infiltrates a high-security NYC penthouse owned by a renowned artist and begins looting some of the paintings and sculptures that are scattered throughout the apartment.

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Everything goes wrong when a system malfunction triggers the apartment’s highest security measures, which not only seal Dafoe’s Nemo inside behind impenetrable steel doors and bulletproof glass windows, but also shut off the penthouse’s electricity and plumbing. Abandoned by his fellow heist members, Nemo quickly begins to realize that his out-of-town mark’s apartment has now become the prison he may very well die in. From that point on, Nemo’s desperation to survive only continues to grow until he’s willing to not only eat dog food, but also scale dangerously high stacks of rearranged furniture on the slim chance that they might lead him to freedom.

The places Inside eventually goes aren’t nearly as interesting as its first act suggests. That fact doesn’t take away from how genuinely effective the first 20 minutes or so of Inside are. After throwing the film’s initial heist premise out the window, Katsoupis and Hopkins spend Inside ‘s opening minutes stacking problem upon problem on Dafoe’s Nemo until the sense of dread created by his seemingly inescapable situation has become overwhelming. The early moments where Nemo successfully disables his new prison’s blaring alarms and figures out how to take full advantage of its miniature garden’s sprinkler system also set Inside up to be a Man Escaped -esque, Robert Bresson-inspired minimalist thriller.

It’s not much of a spoiler to reveal that Inside ultimately doesn’t end up going that route. Instead, the film spends most of its second and third acts pursuing surreal detours and lingering on moments of quiet, increasingly dull madness. At first, the latter scenes, including one where Dafoe’s Nemo decides to tell a joke to an entire imaginary crowd of listeners, hit with a considerable level of startling sharpness. By the time Nemo’s puppeteering chairs and singing the same songs over and over again to himself, though, the film has lost so much tension that even Dafoe’s biggest moments of crazed desperation end up feeling more superfluous than shocking or unnerving.

Rather than maintaining a constant strain of tension, Inside becomes so wrapped up in wallowing in the misery of its protagonist’s situation that any sense of urgency or suspense has utterly disintegrated by the time the film has reached its halfway point. While  Inside  tosses in more than a few moments of surreal fantasy throughout its runtime as well, very few of them actually land with any real weight. Behind the camera, Katsoupis’ visual style feels so suffocatingly controlled that it prevents Inside from ever truly reaching the kind of surreal, dreamlike heights that it so desperately aims for.

Of the film’s surreal sequences, the only one that leaves much of a lasting impression sees Dafoe’s Nemo briefly fantasize about a maid (Eliza Stuyck) he’s watched through a set of security cameras make her way into his penthouse prison and share a moment of restrained intimacy with him. Katsoupis’ camera cuts extremely close to Dafoe’s lips and cheeks throughout the scene, and Steve Annis’ cinematography lovingly captures the moments when Stuyck’s maid traces her lips and fingers along Nemo’s face without ever actually touching him.

The scene is one of the only moments where Inside feels locked into its protagonist’s emotions and loneliness. For the rest of its runtime, Inside feels far too preoccupied with maintaining a cold, omniscient perspective. While it briefly feints toward interesting ideas about the way in which wealth and art have become toxically linked in the 21st century as well, Inside never pursues any of its various ideas deeply enough for them to feel fully baked or thought-provoking. The fact that the film’s story concludes with a series of suggestive images rather than a dose of concrete catharsis (or even dark humor) only makes it that much more clear just how badly Katsoupis has gauged what moviegoers may actually want from Inside ’s story.

It’s the tragic irony at the heart of Inside that, much like its protagonist, the film never really ends up going anywhere.

Inside is now playing in theaters.

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Andrew Dominik’s Blonde opens, quite fittingly, with the flashing of bulbs. In several brief, twinkling moments, we see a rush of images: cameras flashing, spotlights whirring to life, men roaring with excitement (or anger — sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference), and at the center of it all is her, Marilyn Monroe (played by Ana de Armas), striking her most iconic pose as a gust of wind blows up her white dress. It’s an opening that makes sense for a film about a fictionalized version of Monroe’s life, one that firmly roots the viewer in the world and space of a movie star. But to focus only on de Armas’ Marilyn is to miss the point of Blonde’s opening moments.

As the rest of Dominik’s bold, imperfect film proves, Blonde is not just about the recreation of iconic moments, nor is it solely about the making of Monroe’s greatest career highlights. It is, instead, about exposure and, in specific, the act of exposing yourself — for art, for fame, for love — and the ways in which the world often reacts to such raw vulnerability. In the case of Blonde, we're shown how a world of men took advantage of Monroe’s vulnerability by attempting to control her image and downplay her talent.

Meet Cute wants to be a lot of things at once. The film, which premieres exclusively on Peacock this week, is simultaneously a manic time travel adventure, playful romantic comedy, and dead-serious commentary on the messiness of romantic relationships. If that sounds like a lot for one low-budget rom-com to juggle — and within the span of 89 minutes, no less — that’s because it is. Thanks to the performance given by its game lead star, though, there are moments when Meet Cute comes close to pulling off its unique tonal gambit.

Unfortunately, the film’s attempts to blend screwball comedy with open-hearted romanticism often come across as hackneyed rather than inspired. Behind the camera, director Alex Lehmann fails to bring Meet Cute’s disparate emotional and comedic elements together, and the movie ultimately lacks the tonal control that it needs to be able to discuss serious topics like depression in the same sequence that it throws out, say, a series of slapstick costume gags.  The resulting film is one that isn't memorably absurd so much as it is mildly irritating.

Pearl is a candy-coated piece of rotten fruit. The film, which is director Ti West’s prequel to this year's X, trades in the desaturated look and 1970s seediness of its parent film for a lurid, Douglas Sirk-inspired aesthetic that seems, at first, to exist incongruently with its story of intense violence and horror. But much like its titular protagonist, whose youthful beauty and Southern lilt masks the monster within, there’s a poison lurking beneath Pearl’s vibrant colors and seemingly untarnished Depression-era America setting.

Set around 60 years before X, West’s new prequel does away with the por nstars, abandoned farms, and eerie old folks that made its predecessor’s horror influences clear and replaces them with poor farmers, charming film projectionists, and young women with big dreams. Despite those differences, Pearl still feels like a natural follow-up to X. The latter film, with its use of split screens and well-placed needle drops, offered a surprisingly dark rumination on the horror of old age. Pearl, meanwhile, explores the loss of innocence and, in specific, the often terrifying truths that remain after one’s dreams have been unceremoniously ripped away from them.

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New emotions emerge in 'Inside Out 2' — including nostalgia for the original film

Justin Chang

Joy and Anxiety (voiced by Amy Poehler and Maya Hawke) meet in Riley's head in Inside Out 2. Disney/Pixar hide caption

As Inside Out 2 gets under way, things are looking up for Riley, the hockey-loving kid who moved with her parents from Minnesota to San Francisco in the first Inside Out . She’s adjusted to her new life, school and friends, and her five personified emotions — who share the high-tech headquarters of her brain — have learned to work together in relative harmony. Joy, voiced by Amy Poehler , is still mostly in charge, but now she and Sadness — the incomparable Phyllis Smith — make a great team, along with the other key emotions, Anger, Fear and Disgust.

But now Riley is 13, which means pimples, growth spurts and a much more complicated emotional life. The director Kelsey Mann, taking over for the first film’s Pete Docter , cleverly dramatizes the onset of puberty as a huge disruption for Joy and Company, who don’t know why their usual routine is suddenly causing Riley to undergo wild mood swings. It turns out, a new emotion has joined headquarters: Anxiety, voiced by a terrific Maya Hawke.

The 'Inside Out' movies give kids an 'emotional vocabulary.' Therapists love that

Anxiety has brought along her own team of emotions. They’re basically the three E’s: Envy, Ennui and Embarrassment, voiced by Ayo Edebiri , Adèle Exarchopoulos and Paul Walter Hauser. Some of this stretches conceptual credibility: Surely this isn’t the first time in her life that Riley has experienced some of those feelings. But that’s part of the whimsical pleasure of the Inside Out films: It’s fun to feel your own brain arguing with how it’s represented. It’s also fun to see new regions of Riley’s mental landscape, like the giant ravine that fuels her contemptuous side — naturally, it’s called the Sar-chasm.

The story kicks into gear when Riley is sent to an elite three-day hockey camp, where she’s forced to make some tough decisions, like whether to stick with her two closest friends or hang out with the cool older kids. As the pressure on Riley mounts and the competition gets more cutthroat, it’s Anxiety who emerges as the movie’s villain.

These are the 19 movies we're most excited about this summer

Hawke does a great job of making the character’s polite bundle-of-nerves routine a little more annoying — and sinister — in every scene. Anxiety basically engineers a hostile takeover of Riley’s mind, banishing Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust to the outskirts of consciousness, and setting out to mold Riley into a more successful version of herself. What she’s unwittingly doing is making Riley more ambitious and conniving.

Inside Out 2 , in other words, is something of an anti-stress movie, where unchecked drivenness can destroy a person’s true sense of self. It’s hard to argue with that, but it’s also hard not to push back a little. This isn’t the first Pixar movie that’s tried to teach us to lighten up and let things go, a lesson that dates as far back as the first Toy Story. But it’s always struck me as a bit rich coming from Pixar, given the hyper-ambition and perfectionism that have long defined the studio’s brand.

From The 'Inside Out,' A Lively Look Inside A Young Mind

Fortunately, there is a better, deeper message at the heart of Inside Out 2 , that encourages us to take a more expansive view of ourselves — to acknowledge that we all have the capacity for good and bad. As in the first movie, the goal is to strive for balance, embrace complexity and learn to be OK with imperfection.

I’m trying to do that myself with Inside Out 2 , which, despite its many pleasures, is a pretty imperfect movie. It isn’t nearly as emotionally overwhelming as its predecessor, but how could it be? The first Inside Out was a piercing lament for childhood’s end, with Joy and Sadness’ frenemy dynamic as its irresistible core.

Now, Riley’s older and maturing, and it’s natural that her latest adventure should hit us differently. But there are also some bewildering choices here that suggest the story could have used, well, a rethink. There’s one overlong sequence, in which Joy and her friends encounter memories of old cartoon and video-game characters buried deep in Riley’s mind; it’s a cheap gag, and it almost pulled me out of the movie entirely. And there’s a recurring joke, involving Riley’s sense of Nostalgia, that strikes a weirdly sour note. Ironically, it made me feel a little nostalgic myself — for the days when Pixar would have known to leave a bit like that on the cutting-room floor.

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Wait. Pixar finally has a quality animated film hitting theaters? Granted, it’s a sequel. But after seeing “ Turning Red ” pushed to Disney+ while a lukewarm film like “ Lightyear ” took its theatrical place, it’s taken far too many years for the studio to have a distinguished domestically released animated adventure. Even as a reintroduction to a familiar world, Kelsey Mann ’s feature directorial debut “Inside Out 2,” a zippy yet gooey animated quest about belonging and individuality during teenage girlhood feels like a final, albeit predictable, return to normalcy.  

The peppy sequel begins with the upbeat Joy ( Amy Poehler ) believing she has perfected an unimpeachable system. With the help of the usual crew—Sadness ( Phyllis Smith ), Anger ( Lewis Black ), Fear ( Tony Hale ), and Disgust ( Liza Lapira )—she deposits the glass balls holding Riley’s worst memories to a distant realm called the ‘back of the mind' and deposits the best moments to an underground lake whose glowing tendrils reach from the glimmering waters toward the sky, forming the girl’s core beliefs. “I am a good person,” Riley often repeats to herself. 

You can’t really argue with Joy’s methods. Riley, now 13 years old, is giving, smart, and, by Joy’s own account, exceptional. The girl who once feared loneliness in her new Bay Area surroundings has a tight-knit friend group too: Grace ( Grace Lu ) and Bree ( Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green ). The trio are so close that they’ve formed a formidable team on their hockey squad. They’ve even caught the eye of Coach Roberts (Yvette Nicole Brown ), a high school hockey coach who has invited them to a three-day camp where players like Val Ortiz (Lilimar)—Riley’s hero—attend. For Joy and her cohorts, you can’t ask for much more. 

Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein ’s broad screenplay throws the biggest, most obvious obstacle possible at the teenager Riley: Puberty. A late-night alarm, in fact, announces its beginning, leading to some additional emotions appearing: the light-emo silence of Embarrassment ( Paul Walter Hauser ), the French beatnik Ennui ( Adèle Exarchopoulos ), the needy Envy ( Ayo Edebiri ), and an ambitious Anxiety ( Maya Hawke ). When Riley learns her best friends will be attending a different high school next year, Anxiety takes it upon herself to wholly recraft Riley in the hopes that new version of her will impress Val. She throws away Riley's present sense of self to the back of her mind and exiles Joy and the other old emotions. It’s up to Joy and company to restore Riley’s former sense, journeying to the back of the mind, before Anxiety totally upends Riley’s ability to function.

Mann doesn’t necessarily break the formula the first “ Inside Out ” established. This is a fairly straightforward yet affecting story about Joy and Anxiety, both realizing that personhood can’t be reverse-engineered. Riley is so focused on gaining Val’s approval, thereby negating her former best friends, that she merely reflects Val rather than herself. She is also so driven by her competitive desires that she only feels satisfaction whenever she either gains approval from Val or proves her competitive dominance. Seeing Anxiety remold Riley into a blank character as Joy and the other emotions trace through the recesses of Riley’s mind makes for a mostly satisfying structure, allowing the film to assuredly bounce through visually dazzling blitzes of color and whimsy for an intoxicating style that at once feels gentle, fun, and safely crowd-pleasing as it deals with the pressure of being a teenage girl trying to conform to the lofty standards set by other teenage girls.      

That doesn’t mean new jokes aren’t added along the way: a nightmare fueling "Blue’s Clues"-inspired character, a scene in Imagination Land recalling “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” and Mount Crushmore are sharp zingers. The new emotions, however, aren’t as memorable as the primary characters from the prior film. For such an urgent emotion, Envy pretty much fades into the background. Embarrassment has its moments, particularly when put in conversation with Sadness. Ennui’s act wears a tad thin after its initial fast start—the moodiness of being French is understandably a great well to keep hitting. 

None of the new characters carry the same heartbreaking resonance as Bing Bong, who, admittedly, is among the greatest animated characters of the past decade. It’s surprising, then, that Anxiety and Joy barely have any scenes together. Maybe trying to recreate the two-handed dynamic that fueled the first film felt too obvious of a narrative choice. But without much else to replace it, the film does lean heavily on the barrage of jokes it throws at the viewer to carry it through its predictable maneuvering. 

This is also  another film that uses people of color—in this case, Riley's Asian and Black best friend—to prop up a white girl's personal growth. In this scenario, the white girl is unquestionably mean to her friends. But it's okay because she's going through it and needs their hurt to ultimately learn a valuable lesson that'll result in them forgiving her. It's simply more of the same trite privileging. 

Even with these bumps, “Inside Out 2” zips confidently along, fashioning a hypnotic and transportive imaginativeness that is incredible to take in. Powered by an aching core of emotion, the film still manages to be a wondrous distillation of the overwhelming angst, incredible solitude, and difficult changes many teenagers are going through. The film grants an immediate roadmap to navigate this period while allowing adults to laugh from the comfort of having already lived through that debilitating phase of life. 

In a late scene, Riley, unburdened by the drive to succeed, experiences pure joy. In her bliss, she nearly levitates, moving and breathing across the ice with the ease of light shining through a windowpane. Through her delight, you can’t help but feel how the message of learning to inhabit an activity for the love of it rather than for social cache or short-lived gratification is still necessary for all of us to hear.  Even if its ring sounds a tad too familiar.      

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the  New York Times ,  IndieWire , and  Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the  Los Angeles Times , and  Rolling Stone  about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

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Inside Out 2 (2024)

Amy Poehler as Joy (voice)

Maya Hawke as Anxiety (voice)

Kensington Tallman as Riley (voice)

Liza Lapira as Disgust (voice)

Tony Hale as Fear (voice)

Lewis Black as Anger (voice)

Phyllis Smith as Sadness (voice)

Ayo Edebiri as Envy

Adèle Exarchopoulos as Ennui

Paul Walter Hauser as Embarrassment

Lilimar as Val Ortiz

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• Meg LeFauve
• Dave Holstein

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Plugged in review: pixar delivers with ‘inside out 2,’ avoids major pitfalls for christian families.

“Inside Out 2” is fun. It’s thoughtful. And it’s a fantastic conversation starter. And it avoids the major content concerns for Christian parents. “Ultraman: Rising” isn’t perfect. But as far as positive messages go, it definitely earns the title of “ultra.”

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Read on to get Plugged In on what’s beyond the movie titles and trailers for faith-filled and family-first reviews from Focus on the Family’s Plugged In .

Inside Out 2 – In Theaters

For a long while, Pixar could do no wrong.

From 1995’s “ Toy Story ” to 2015’s “ Inside Out ,” the studio churned out a steady stream of critical and commercial hits. In that 20-year span, Pixar released 15 films — and a staggering 11 of them scored 90% or better on Rotten Tomatoes.

While Pixar has still churned out its share of critical and commercial darlings since then, it’s suffered a few misfires, too — perhaps highlighted (or lowlighted?) by 2022’s “ Lightyear ,” considered the first real financial flop on Pixar’s ledger.

Be sure to listen in to The Plugged In Show , a weekly podcast with lighthearted reviews for parents and conversations about entertainment, pop culture and technology: 

Many conservative Christian families steered clear of “Lightyear” because of its LGBT content, but that’s only part of the story of why the movie failed. Truth is, Pixar’s storytelling has also been a bit uneven — at least for Pixar. And those factors — and likely others — led many to eye “Inside Out 2” with caution. “I loved the original,” you might be asking. “But will the sequel match up? Will Disney/Pixar spoil it with ‘woke’ content?”

The answers to those two questions, in order, is yes, and no.

When I reviewed “Inside Out,” it was almost a revelation to me. Not only was it funny and emotional and deeply resonant, but it provided moviegoers with practically a whole new vocabulary to consider their own emotions and those of their kids. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about my own Islands of Identity or used the language of “Inside Out” to discuss my kids’ own thoughts and feelings with them. The sequel continues on that trajectory and gives moviegoers plenty to think about — and talk about. And with so many teens struggling with various forms of mental illness, “Inside Out 2” feels quite timely.

“Inside Out 2” isn’t perhaps the creative and emotional tour-de-force that the original was. But it again introduces us to (pardon the pun) heady emotional concepts with wit and wisdom. It offers some really fun, seemingly throwaway scenes that, when you think about them on the way home from the theater, you realize they had more heft than you thought. It takes you into the mind of a 13-year-old girl and reminds you that maybe you and Riley aren’t all that different.

Riley’s battles with Anxiety reminded me of when I was 13. And they reminded me of when I was 33. Yeah, puberty reliably overturns everyone’s apple cart. But bumps in the emotional road? They know no age limit.

And while the film has some issues (as every film does), it doesn’t come with red, blaring alarms or sirens in terms of its content. And that can allow many a parent’s own version of Anxiety to settle in a nice, comfy chair and take a deep breath.

“Inside Out 2” is fun. It’s thoughtful. And it’s a fantastic conversation starter. It might not be among Pixar’s very best, but that’s a high bar to clear.

And I’ll not lie: It had me smiling even as I wiped away a tear.

Read the rest of the review here . Watch the trailer here .

Ultraman: Rising – Streaming on Netflix

Were you to have told me that the kaiju film subgenre would release some of the most positive messages about life and family I’ve seen since I started my career at Plugged In, I’d have laughed in your face.

When “ Godzilla Minus One ” was released, for instance, I expected little more than a giant monster stomping around a city. And while such stomping did happen, I deeply enjoyed the depth of the story’s positive messages about the value of life.

“Ultraman: Rising” is the latest release in the kaiju category. And, like “Godzilla Minus One,” it’s yet another monster film that comes, somewhat surprisingly, with a lot of positive messages.

As Ken grapples with raising the orphaned baby kaiju, we see him slowly turn from being a self-absorbed baseball player to becoming a sacrificial and loving adoptive father. Of course, this baby kaiju isn’t human in any regard — but as Ken struggles with all of the baby monster’s needs, mishaps and more, we catch a glimpse of the difficulties and triumphs of parenting.

And that’s intentional. Director Shannon Tindle tweeted , “The film was inspired by my experience becoming a parent.” And in another interview , Ms. Tindle described the movie as an “honest approach to family” and “a celebration of the iconic [Ultraman] and my experiences as both a son and a father.”

That’s not to say that “Ultraman: Rising” is perfect. As much as we appreciate its positive messages, the story’s frequent misuse of God’s name remains a big strike against the family-centric film, one that parents will want to think about carefully before they decide whether to watch.

But as far as this film’s positive messages go, “Ultraman: Rising” is just about as “ultra” as it claims.

Plugged In is a Focus on the Family publication designed to shine a light on the world of popular entertainment while giving families the essential tools they need to understand, navigate, and impact the culture in which they live. Through our reviews, articles and discussions, we hope to spark intellectual thought, spiritual growth and a desire to follow the command of Colossians 2:8: “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.”

Reviews written by Paul Asay and Kennedy Unthank .

Copyright © 2024 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission .

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Inside Out 2

Follows Riley, in her teenage years, encountering new emotions. Follows Riley, in her teenage years, encountering new emotions. Follows Riley, in her teenage years, encountering new emotions.

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• Trivia The first trailer received 157 million online views within the first 24 hours, more than any other Disney animated film, surpassing Frozen II (2019) , with 116 million views.

Anxiety : Oh, my gosh! I'm Anxiety. Where can I put my stuff?

• Crazy credits After the credits, Joy opens the vault to try to find out what Riley's Deep Dark Secret is, but is disappointed with the reveal.
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• June 14, 2024 (United States)
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• $200,000,000 (estimated)

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• Runtime 1 hour 36 minutes
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'Inside Out 2' review: The battle between Joy, Anxiety feels very real in profound sequel

For teens, those who aren't yet teens, and anyone who was once a teen, the Pixar sequel “Inside Out 2” hits like an amusing, profound wrecking ball.

The original animated 2015 comedy “Inside Out” took audiences into young girl Riley’s complex mind and showcased a bevy of colorful emotions trying to keep it together for the kid’s sake, crafting an uncannily relatable movie in the process. Directed by Kelsey Mann, the next chapter (★★★½ out of four; rated PG; in theaters Friday) grows up alongside the newly minted teen and imagines the internal struggle, for all of us, when anxiety takes control.

The first "Inside Out" ended with Riley turning 12, and the sequel catches up with her (now voiced by Kensington Tallman) – as well as her core emotions Joy ( Amy Poehler ), Anger (Lewis Black), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira) – a year later. Riley has gone through a growth spurt, got braces (Disgust must have loved that day) and two besties, plus is a hockey star.

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The high school coach (Yvette Nicole Brown) sees her play and invites her to a skills camp – do well there and she could be playing as a freshman beside her super-cool idol Val Ortiz (Lilimar). The night before, however, Riley’s mind is thrown into disarray when Joy and Co. notice the red “puberty” button flashing and a demolition crew arrives to make way for new emotions. With frizzy hair and big plans to change things around, Anxiety ( Maya Hawke ) is the leader of this bunch that also includes precocious Envy (Ayo Edebiri), disinterested Ennui (Adele Exarchopoulos) – or, as she calls herself, “the boredom” – and painfully shy Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).

The major friction within the first movie – Joy needing to find a way to deal with Sadness – seems like small potatoes compared to a battle over Riley's entire belief system. As the girl is forced to choose between hanging with her friends or making new ones like Val, Anxiety pulls a coup, ditching the conflicted youngster's Sense of Self and exiling Joy's old emotions to the back of Riley’s mind with a mountain of bad memories.

“Inside Out 2” frontloads the funny bits and then wallops you in the final act, which ambitiously depicts the desperate hopelessness when anxiety has a hold and won’t let go. (“I don’t know how to stop Anxiety," Joy says, one of the truest things you’ll ever hear in an animated fantasy.)

The middle is where it loses focus, as Joy’s group goes on a mission to set Riley right before it’s too late. The original movie took a similar tack but did it better, and the sequel misses a real chance to flesh out the intriguing new emotions more. Aside from Anxiety, a truly inspired Disney antagonist, they feel more like side characters than Anger, Fear, Disgust and Sadness did in the first outing.

The way these movies artfully create a connection between real life and a fantastical inner existence is still top-notch. Every parent of a tween or teenager will feel seen via a construction sign that reads “Puberty is messy” and get a kick out of Mount Crushmore, part of a revamped Imagination Land. And while there’s no Bing Bong around this time, the introduction of preschool cartoon canine Bloofy (Ron Funches) and the scene-stealing Nostalgia (June Squibb) showcase that signature “Inside Out” cleverness in its personalities.

Pixar has rightfully taken knocks for sequels and prequels that don’t hold up to the beloved originals. Recent films like “Turning Red,” “Luca” and “Soul” have the novel spark that's missing from, say, “Monsters University,” “Cars 3” and “Lightyear.” But “Inside Out 2” is one of the better revisits in the studio’s history because of how well it knows its audience.

Who hasn't felt anxiety getting the better of joy or a natural connection between sadness and embarrassment? With empathy, hope and a heap of metaphors, it's a matured "Inside Out" that still understands the wonders and wrinkles of being a kid.

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Movie Review: Peace (and pieces) of mind ‘Inside Out 2'

This image released by Disney/Pixar shows, from left, Joy, voiced by Amy Poehler, background left, Anger, voiced by Lewis Black, Disgust, voiced by Liza Lapira, Envy, voiced by Ayo Edebiri, and Anxiety, voiced by Maya Hawke, in a scene from “Inside Out 2.” (Disney/Pixar via AP)

This image released by Disney/Pixar shows, from left, Sadness, voiced by Phyllis Smith, Joy, voiced by Amy Poehler, Disgust, voiced by Liza Lapira, Fear, voiced by Tony Hale and Anger, voiced by Lewis Black, in a scene from “Inside Out 2.” (Disney/Pixar via AP)

This image released by Disney/Pixar shows, from left, Sadness, voiced by Phyllis Smith, left, and Joy, voiced by Amy Poehler, in a scene from “Inside Out 2.” (Disney/Pixar via AP)

This image released by Disney/Pixar shows, from left, Embarrassment, voiced by Paul Walter Hauser, Anxiety, voiced by Maya Hawke, Envy, voiced by Ayo Edebiri, and Ennui, voiced by Adèle Exarchopoulos in a scene from “Inside Out 2.” (Disney/Pixar via AP)

This image released by Disney/Pixar shows promotional art for “Inside Out 2.” (Disney/Pixar via AP)

This image released by Disney/Pixar shows, from left, Joy, voiced by Amy Poehler, Embarrassment, voiced by Paul Walter Hauser, Envy, voiced by Ayo Edebiri, Anxiety, voiced by Maya Hawke, Disgust, voiced by Liza Lapira, Anger, voiced by Lewis Black (foreground), Fear, voiced by Tony Hale, and Sadness, voiced by Phyllis Smith, in a scene from “Inside Out 2.” (Disney/Pixar via AP)

This image released by Disney/Pixar shows Joy, voiced by Amy Poehler, left, and Anxiety, voiced by Maya Hawke, in a scene from “Inside Out 2.” (Disney/Pixar via AP)

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Sequels have been a touchy subject when it comes to Pixar, but it’s hard to deny the natural premise of “Inside Out 2.” It’s been nine years since “Inside Out,” yet in the span between that film and its new sequel, Riley, the young girl with a head full of emotions, has gone from 11 years old to 13. She’s just grown up a little.

Or maybe a lot. In the middle of the night, the old gang of Joy ( Amy Poehler ), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Tony Hale), Disgust (Liza Lapira) and Anger (Lewis Black) are roused from their beds by a soft beep, like a fire alarm in need of a new battery, but soon it’s sounding an all-out emergency. On their console a red light blinks. “What’s that?” one says. “Puberty,” the button reads. Soon, construction workers are swarming the control room for “demo day,” with wrecking balls making room for “the others.”

In come a new gaggle of emotions said to be more sophisticated: Anxiety ( Maya Hawke ), Envy ( Ayo Edebiri ), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos). The next morning, Riley wakes up to find herself unusually stinky. Life, as they say, comes at you pretty fast. “Inside Out 2” turns out to be not just a modest, inch-things-along sequel but a follow-up of cataclysmic proportions.

Tempting as it is to take any revisiting of “Inside Out” — a high water mark for not just Pixar but ’10s American movies — as sacrilegious, its sequel is deftly sensitive to one of the most awkward chapters of life. The giddy sense of imagination is a little less boundless this time. One could certainly look at “Inside Out 2” like a parent eyeing a teenager and thinking the younger version was cuter and less whiny. But the filmmakers of “Inside Out 2” have managed again to filter complex psychological developments into a bright, entertaining head trip that in its finest moments packs an emotional wallop.

I would peg Joy as the real protagonist of the first “Inside Out.” That movie, really, hinged on the blue-haired sprite’s desperate race to preserve all the happiness of childhood. Aided especially by Poehler’s brilliant voice work, Joy — a kind of stand-in for parents wanting only the best for their kids — was less just another emotion than an unflagging guardian learning that sometimes letting go is best.

This time, Riley feels more the main character, though Anxiety, an excitable, orange, bug-eyed Muppet-like thing, is increasingly calling the shots. Riley (voiced by Kensington Tallman) is now taller, has a few good friends and is still playing hockey. Her internal landscape is shifting, too. Boy Band Island is done, for one. And out of her pools of memories, new strands are growing a tree-shaped Belief System. Just who Riley is, at her core, gets tested and reshaped in “Inside Out 2.”

Some of the brain trust on the film are also new. Kelsey Mann, a longtime Pixar veteran, takes over directing from Pete Docter (now the Pixar chief) to make his debut feature. The script is by Meg LeFauve, who co-wrote the original, and Dave Holstein.

My recollections of “Inside Out” — if my memory orbs have been correctly filed — are mostly of all those glowing balls of the past and Joy and Sadness’ mad dashes through the back of Riley’s mind, a pun-filled inner space both literal and metaphorical. Plus, we can’t forget, Richard Kind’s voice as Bing Bong.

Much is the same in “Inside Out 2” (though, alas, Bing Bong sleeps with the fishes). But the film is a little more tilted outside Riley’s mind. As the school year is coming to a close, Riley heads to a weekend hockey camp that’s a preview of her high-school life to come.

New stresses are developing. Her pals (voiced by Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green and Grace Lu) are headed to a different school, Riley learns. On the ice, what was once carefree play is becoming a more complicated experience plagued by self-doubt. At camp, Riley really wants to impress an older star player named Val (Lilimar Hernandez). To do so, Anxiety, usurping Joy, increasingly sacrifices core beliefs to manically build Riley a new identity. Joy and others, booted from the control room, again have to work frantically to mount a resistance, while at the same time learning a lesson about the need to reconcile — not just try to forget — less happy memories.

“Inside Out 2,” which arrives after a period of soul-searching for Pixar, both recaptures some of the animation studio’s magic and reminds us that rekindling the ambitious spirit of Pixar’s heyday isn’t so easy. The sequel stays close to familiar neural pathways. There are new cerebral puns — the echoing depths of a Sar-"chasm,” a brainstorm that rains light bulbs — and a new cartoon relic of childhood to replace Bing Bong: a character named Bloofy, voiced by Ron Funches. It’s easier to see where this “Inside Out” is headed and a little harder to be dazzled by what unfolds.

But it’s aim is remarkably true. Confronting the struggles and realities of anxiety, particularly for teenage girls, could hardly be a more laudable undertaking. And the care is taken here to illustrate how new impulses can run roughshod over a young person and throw their internal compass out of whack.

Pixar, like other studios wrestling with a new media landscape, has dabbled in recent years with more short-form and digital-friendly content. But Docter has steered Pixar back to focusing on feature films with robust theatrical releases. (“Inside Out 2” is to exclusively play for 100 days in theaters.) So in more ways than one, Mann’s movie feels like a much-needed feature-length refuge from today’s anxiety-producing devices. Unlike many of Pixar’s moving metaphors of parenthood, this one is, affectingly, for the kids.

“Inside Out 2,” a Walt Disney Co. release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association for some thematic elements. Running time: 96 minutes. Three stars out of four.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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‘Inside Out 2’ Review: PUBERTY! OMG! LOL! IYKYK!

Anxiety meets Joy in Pixar’s eager, predictably charming sequel to its innovative 2015 hit. Sadness is still around, too, as are Fear and Disgust.

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‘Inside Out 2’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The director kelsey mann narrates a sequence from his film..

“My name is Kelsey Mann, and I’m the director of ‘Inside Out 2.’ So here in this scene, we see Joy and the original emotions come on to this new space that’s inside Riley’s imagination. And it’s an area that’s being taken over by Anxiety. She’s working with all these mind workers to come up with worst case scenarios of what could happen the next day to Riley and how she could screw it all up.” “Riley misses an open goal. Coach writes about it in her notebook. Yes, more like that.” “Oh, no. They’re using Riley’s imagination against her.” “And Joy wants to stop that at all costs. I always envisioned this being a movie about anxiety taking over and was reflecting on my own life and how my anxiety does that in me. And the instant my head hits the pillow, I start thinking about the next day, thinking and worrying about what could go wrong and how I can kind of avoid those things. And I thought this could be something that I think a lot of people could relate to.” “Why are you drawing a hippo?” “I’m not. I’m drawing. Riley.” “Joy, you forgot her ponytail.” “Oh, I love her ponytail. Yes.” “Riley scores and everyone hugs her? 81? That is not helping.” “Visually, with this space, I always kind of imagined it like a bunch of workers in cubicles. But we’re like, well, this place is in Imagination Land. How do we make it a little bit more fun? And it was really — Jason Deamer is our production designer and Josh West is our sets art director. They came up with this really fun idea of using giant playing cards as the cubicle walls.” “Who sent that projection to Riley?” “Why would I know that?” “What is going on? Who is sending all of this positive — Joy, I know you’re in there.” “And then we’re like, wait a minute, what if the workers are actually animating? What if they’re drawing on animation desks?” “Don’t listen to Anxiety. She’s using these horrible projections to change Riley.” “A lot of this is based off of a bunch of oppressed workers that eventually stand up to their employer and their boss. And we were definitely inspired by a few scenes. There were three in particular I would refer to — ‘Field of Dreams,’ where she’s standing up talking about the book burning. Then there’s ‘Jerry Maguire,’ where he was saying, come on, everybody. Join me. I’m quitting, and come with me. And then the really iconic one was ‘Norma Rae,’ where she’s standing up and unionizing and having everybody turn off their machines.” “Yeah, there we go.” “What if Riley is so bad she has to give up hockey forever?” “What if Riley does so well that the coach cries, and the Olympics call and she rallies a weary nation to victory?” “Uh, Joy, reality is also a thing.” “And also ‘Network.’ Anger’s speech here was 100 percent influenced from ‘Network.’” “Nightmares. But you don’t have to take it anymore.” “And what better person than Lewis Black to deliver a speech like that.” [MUSIC PLAYING] “Oh, my projections!” “Pillow fight!” “Riley!” “You need to be prepared.”

By Manohla Dargis

When a dumpling of an old lady toddles into the animated charmer “Inside Out 2,” she is quickly shooed away by some other characters. Wearing rose-tinted glasses, she has twinkling eyes and a helmet of white hair. Her name is Nostalgia, and those who wave her off — Joy and Sadness included — tell her it’s too soon for her to show up. I guess that they’ve never seen a Pixar movie, much less “Inside Out,” a wistful conceptual dazzler about a girl that is also a testament to one of the pleasures of movies: the engagement of our emotions.

If you’ve seen “ Inside Out ” (2015), your tear ducts will already be primed for the sequel. The original movie centers on the life of Riley, a cute, predictably spunky if otherwise decidedly ordinary 11-year-old. What distinguishes Riley is that her inner workings are represented as an elaborate realm with characters who embody her basic emotions. For much of her life, those emotions have been orchestrated by Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), a barefoot, manic pixie. Once Riley’s parents move the family to a new city, though, Sadness (Phyllis Smith) steps up, and our girl spirals into depression. This being the wonderful world of Pixar, the emotions eventually find a new harmonious balance, and Riley again becomes a happy child.

When “Inside Out 2” opens, Joy is still running the show with Sadness, Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira) inside a bright tower called headquarters. It’s here, in the hub of Riley’s mind — an ingeniously detailed, labyrinthine expanse that’s part carnival, part industrial zone — that they monitor her on an enormous oval screen, as if they were parked behind her eyes. They track, manage and sometimes disrupt her thinking and actions, at times by working a control console, which looks like a sound mixing board and grows more complex as she ages. By the time the first movie ends, a mysterious new button labeled “puberty” has materialized on the console; soon after the sequel opens, that button has turned into a shrieking red alarm.

Puberty unleashes trouble for Riley (Kensington Tallman) in “Inside Out 2,” some of it very poignant, most of it unsurprising. It’s been almost a decade since the first movie was released, but film time is magical and shortly after the story opens, Riley is blowing out the candles on her 13th birthday cake with metal braces on her teeth and a stubborn pimple on her chin. New emotions soon enter headed by Anxiety (Maya Hawke), a carrot-colored sprite with jumpy eyebrows and excitable hair. Not long afterward, Anxiety takes command both of the console and of Riley, with help from Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and my favorite, the studiously weary, French-accented Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos).

Directed by Kelsey Mann, this smooth, streamlined sequel largely focuses on Riley’s nerve-jangling (and strictly PG) interlude at a girls’ hockey camp, an episode that separates her from her parents while bringing her new friends, feelings and choices. (Mann came up with the story with Meg LeFauve, who wrote the screenplay with Dave Holstein.) As in the first movie, the story restlessly shifts between what happens inside Riley’s head and what happens as she navigates the world. Her new emotions find her worrying, grousing, blushing and feigning indifference, and while Joy and the rest of the older emotions are humorously waylaid at times, you can always feel the filmmakers leading Riley toward emotional wellness.

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