3 days ago
‘Inside' Review: Guy Pearce Delivers Another Incredible Supporting Performance in Australian Prison Drama That Cuts Through All the Bull
The lower-security prisoners in Charles Williams' difficult but deeply penetrating 'Inside' sometimes pass the time by playing the trivia games that are printed on the packaging of their sweets. 'WHO AM I?' the text asks, before offering a series of clues about, say, a Brooklyn-born musician who got his first break when Bette Midler hired him as a pianist. Most of the characters in this decidedly grounded Australian prison drama are too young — and too many worlds removed — to know who Barry Manilow is, let alone guess his identity based on a handful of factoids. But that doesn't stop these men from trying, even if they spend every day of their sentences trying to separate their souls from the bullet points of their own biographies. Are they more than what they've done? The people they've hurt? The situations they were born into?
We know they are. Not because they're human, and we have the natural grace to extend these murderers the courtesy of that recognition, but rather because this film wouldn't have any reason to exist if the answer to any of those questions was 'no.' The abundant power of Williams' debut feature — which stems from his experience growing up in an economically dispossessed Victoria town whose jail was like a second home for several of the men in his family — is rooted in the fact that 'Inside' never pretends otherwise.
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This is not a story that labors to earn its prisoners their humanity. On the contrary, it's a story about how their clear and inextinguishable humanity is liable to become a prison unto itself. In the borrowed words of long-time inmate Warren Murfett (a bushy and brilliant Guy Pearce): 'The worst of men have a little bit of good in them, and that'll be their undoing.'
Warren is quoting another inmate at the same time as he's mocking the way that some of his fellow convicts try to protect themselves with aphorisms, but some pearls of wisdom are worth carrying around in your pocket like a shiv at the ready. For a man with blood on his hands like Warren, it's that last mote of humanity that might prove to be his doom — the stubborn part of himself that still yearns for redemption, hopes for healing, and strives to make something more of himself before there's nothing left.
It's the part of himself that 17-year-old Mel Blight (puppy-eyed newcomer Vincent Miller, wrenchingly credible in his first movie role) is already trying to stamp out by the time Williams' film begins to take shape around him. In his opening voiceover, which floats above the sort of glassy synth music that's meant to numb our judgment, Mel informs us that he was conceived during a conjugal visit when his father was in prison, and that his dad once told him that he was destined to wind up back behind bars. 'And he was right.' A broken home gave way to juvenile detention, and the violence that followed him there saw Mel transferred to general population — not unheard of in a country where kids as young as 10 can be locked away indefinitely.
Now that he's inching toward parole, Mel's doing everything in his power to fuck it up. 'They want me to make a story out of it and pretend I've changed,' he says when asked to write a letter of contrition to the boy he beat to death in juvie. 'But I haven't changed. No one does, especially inside.' By 'inside' he means prison, but Williams' delicate script obviously intends for us to recognize that he means inside himself as well.
If this film is able to afford such an explicit double entendre, that's because of how truthfully it grapples with the nuances of rehabilitation — with the crooked path these men are meant to walk from sin to salvation, and with the practical realities of returning to a world that may no longer have a place for them in it. Like so many of the people he meets in prison, Mel doesn't think he's worthy of being released. 'There's something broken inside of us,' he writes in one of his letters, and it's easier for him to own that spiritual dysfunction than to risk the heartache of failing to overcome it.
That's a big part of the initial reason why Warren takes Mel under his wing: The kid is the perfect candidate to kill the most hated man in prison, whose bounty would be enough to pay off Warren's dire gambling debt. The target's name is Mark Shepard (a slack-jawed Cosmo Jarvis, who continues to be one of the most gifted chameleons in modern cinema), he became a national sensation when he was convicted for the rape and murder of a young girl when he was only 13 years old himself, and — after earning a transfer out of maximum security — he happens to be Mel's new cellmate.
What separates Mark from the other two characters in this movie's core triangle is that he's evangelically convinced of his own absolution, to the point that he delivers Pentecostal sermons to the world's most hostile congregation. He even ropes Mel into playing the prayer room keyboard as he preaches. It's a little detail, but also one emblematic of the irreconcilable tension that 'Inside' would rather articulate than resolve; Williams often lingers on the image of Mel sitting focused at the piano, forcing us to guess whether the kid is starting to entertain the possibility of self-deliverance, or whether he's plotting how to stab the man at the pulpit. Of course, Mel's dilemma isn't so black-and-white, especially because offing a 'monster' of Mark's caliber might be the shortest possible route to getting right with God.
'Inside' eventually builds to a clear moment of choice for the sake of its own climax, but the vast majority of this movie is spent complicating its characters' logic rather than framing their choices as some moral binary. Not only do Williams and Jarvis conspire to rescue a mottled innocence from the recesses of Mark's tortured mind (a process that hinges on a truly shocking reveal), but Pearce's layered and wrenchingly humane performance eventually reveals Warren to be the heart of the film.
That isn't because Warren evolves from the diabolical manipulator that he seems to be at the start of this story, but rather because we bear witness to how the character reframes himself as his greatest mark. He might tell Mel that breaking their cycles of violence is as foolish as thinking a different song might come on when you replay a tape, but some of his actions suggest otherwise, and the surrogate father role Warren assumes while coaching Mel towards another murder starts to affect the older man after he suffers a disastrous visit with his actual son during a brief furlough ('Babyteeth' breakout Toby Wallace is outstanding in the crucial one-scene role). The Joker-like shot of Warren sticking his head out of a car window on the way back to jail, his beard blasting against his face in the wind, is an unforgettably poignant snapshot of a man who's free from everything but himself.
'Inside' is a small and constrained prison drama, even by the inflexible standards of its genre, and yet Williams' debut is so replete with such moments of raw compassion that it almost invisibly accumulates a deep well of emotion — one that allows the film to feel much bigger than it looks by the time it arrives at its absolute knockout of a final scene. There are a few small cheats along the way, but 'Inside' is averse to didacticism and neoliberal heart-softening when it counts, and the power it achieves in the end is inextricable from the honesty with which it's earned. 'Who Am I?' is a mystery that none of these characters may ever be able to solve for themselves, at least not with the certainty of a trivia game on the back of a candy wrapper, but to watch them look for the answers in each other is enough to convince us that the question is always worth asking.
'Inside' screened at the 2025 Tribeca Festival. Quiver Distribution will release it in theaters on Friday, June 20.
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