Guy Pearce has been nominated for an Oscar this year. About time, too! However, I fear that the nomination is for the wrong film. As good as his performance as the scene chewing bilious buggerising billionaire in The Brutalist, his characterisation in INSIDE is better, brilliantly nuanced and strikingly real.
INSIDE begins with a photo of a fetus, an ultrasound of a potential human, which, prompted by off screen narration, makes us ponder: when do things start going awry – inside the womb? Are we born a certain way that will lead to a life of crime and incarceration?
And if so, what are the chances of redemption, of rehabilitation? Pearce linchpins this puzzle of a film about penance, parole and how hard it is to achieve redemption and rehabilitation by the incarcerated.
Written and directed by Charles Williams, Pearce co stars with Vincent Miller, Cosmo Jarvis, Toby Wallace and Tammy MacIntosh. Pearce plays Warren Murfett, a prisoner nearing parole, who becomes a reluctant de facto protector and mentor of a newbie inmate, Mel Blight, played by Vincent Miller.
Incarcerated in the same prison is Mark Shepard, doing time for an abominable crime, and who has a bounty on his head. Shepard, played with brooding intensity by Cosmo Jarvis, has found Jesus and zealously proselytises his fellow inmates with evangelical sermons complete with speaking in tongues. But are these tongues forked or a sincere act of contrition leading to some sort of salvation?
Just transferred from juvenile detention to adult prison, Mel Blight gets taken under the wings of these two really different and damaged father figures, and as you watch them, you’re not quite sure which one’s trying to manipulate him and which one sincerely wants to help him, or, indeed, whether there’s a complete or absolute difference between those things.
INSIDE is not your average, run of the mill jailhouse jive. The film doesn’t in any way excuse the behaviours of perpetrators, but opens up plenty of conversation points, holding multiple ideas of nurture and nature and keeping them in play in an entertainingly dramatic way.
Tension is built within the prison with plots and coded conspiracy and an added source of tension is provided when Murfett is on day release and has an encounter with his estranged son, played with contemptuous simmer by Toby Wallace.
There are myriad mitigating factors to every personality that are intriguingly written and masterfully played in this riveting and engrossing movie.
