Inside (2016)

This review contains spoilers. 

How exactly do you ruin a perfectly good film? Well, you could ask the producers of 2016’s Inside, a remake of the 2007 French horror film À l’intérieur. The original film was, from this reviewer’s point of view, incredibly intense. I remember being on the edge of my seat watching it for the first time, and when it got to the amazing ending, I fell in love with it. The ending to that film was so incredible that I thought about it for days. Fast forward to 2016, and America decides that it needs to remake another foreign horror film. When they sat down to discuss this remake, they must have been thinking “how can we piss off fans of the original film and continue a tradition of making terrible remakes?”

Both films follow the same plot (off to a good start, right?). After a car crash in the beginning of the film, we jump forward a few months where we meet up with our main character (named Sarah in the remake) who is on the eve of giving birth (Christmas Eve in both films). She lost her husband in the car accident and is, for the most part, all alone. After she goes home to the darkest and most horrifyingly scary looking house (turn on some lights), we meet her gay neighbors and her mother (a.k.a. all the eventual victims).

Sarah is clearly still upset about the accident in the beginning of the film and states her nervousness about giving birth and being a single mother (blah, blah, blah). We then meet a person who is only referred to as “the woman”. She shows up at Sarah’s house at night asking to use her phone and claiming that she’s been in a car accident. Sarah, being cautious, says no and turns her away. After she has gone to sleep, the woman breaks into her house, knocks Sarah out, and puts an IV in her arm to induce labor.

Here’s where there are certain parts of the original that they chose to leave out. While it’s been awhile since I’ve seen the original, I don’t remember the IV and induced labor. From what I remember, Sarah stays asleep until the woman drags a pair of huge scissors over her stomach sticks them into her belly button. That “calm before the storm” is gone in this remake.

Sarah eventually wakes up, fights her way to the bathroom, and locks herself in. For a while, this all plays out like the original. At some point, while Sarah is trying to escape the bathroom, her mother shows up and as she comes up the stairs Sarah stabs her in the throat with a pair of scissors thinking she was the woman. This plays out exactly like it did in the original and I was very happy they kept it. In both films, it’s a crazy, horrifying sequence that I remember being shocked by in the original (obviously I knew about it ahead of time watching the remake).

Another scene that they decided to nix completely is one where Sarah finds herself trapped in the bathroom and she uses scissors to cut a hole in the door big enough to get her arm through and move the object blocking her in. In the original, this was one of my favorite scenes because just when you think Sarah is going to get out, the woman grabs her arm and stabs her hand to the wall with the scissors. It’s another one of those instances that took me completely by surprise, and if I remember correctly she’s stuck to the wall for quite a while. In the remake, the woman does grab her arm but Sarah quickly pulls it back in—end of scene.

The biggest problem that I had with this movie was the last scene. In the original, Sarah has been through Hell, and by the time it’s over she is drenched in blood from head to toe. She’s been in labor through most of the film and is ready to give birth. With the woman trying to help her through it, Sarah yells out “he’s stuck” and the woman takes these huge scissors, which by this point have become their own character, and proceeds to cut into her belly to remove the baby. Yes, you read that right, she sticks the scissors into her and cuts her open. It was something that I didn’t expect at all and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

What did they do in the remake? Sarah and the woman, who in both films, was in the other car during the opening accident which caused her to lose her baby, wind up fighting in a swimming pool. They get stuck under the pool cover and when the woman realizes that Sarah is drowning, she uses the scissors to cut the pool cover and get Sarah above the water sacrificing herself in the process. Sarah gives birth. The end… What? What was going through their minds? This is the most Americanized ending to a horror film that I’ve ever seen! Why change the incredible ending of the original film?

Overall, there was absolutely no reason to remake this film. They didn’t change much except for the good things, and in turn they ruined a perfectly good movie. If you want to see a crazy and incredible film go check out the original 2007 French version, and by all costs avoid the 2016 American remake. You won’t be sorry.