By Jake Wilson
INSIDE
Written and directed by Charles Williams
104 minutes, rated MA
Reviewed by JAKE WILSON
★★★
Many Australian actors excel at playing lowlifes, but I’ve never thought of Guy Pearce as one of them. Villains, yes, but more often the high-and-mighty sort, like the deranged American millionaire in the recent The Brutalist, a turn that won him an Oscar nomination.
But the Australian prison drama Inside lets him extend his range as Warren Murfett, a long-term inmate who takes a shine to the youthfully naive new arrival Mel Blight (played in a twitchy but subdued manner by Vincent Miller, in his big-screen debut).
Guy Pearce and Vincent Miller.Credit:
Physically dangerous but above all manipulative, Warren’s the kind of well-spoken crim who considers himself more evolved than those around him – and in the prison context, maybe he’s right.
Certainly, he’s sharper than Pearce’s Brutalist character, though the two have points in common, including intellectual vanity and underlying loneliness. Having dreamed of stardom in his youth, Warren clearly still needs someone to admire him – one reason he turns to Mel, along with his other, more sinister intentions.
These intentions centre on Mel’s new cellmate Mark, a hoarse-voiced paedophile who’s been locked up his whole adult life and has developed his own form of Christianity like a character out of Flannery O’Connor story – a grotesque figure played with conviction by the British actor Cosmo Jarvis, whose performance is no more extreme than is warranted under the circumstances (I also would not have guessed he wasn’t Australian).
This is the first feature from writer-director Charles Williams, and a fair amount of it doesn’t work, starting with the heavy-handed ambiguity of the title (on the inside as in prison, but also inside the characters’ minds – get it?). His style has a comparable heaviness, with pointed cutaways to symbolic objects, brief flashbacks to scenes better left to the imagination, and more brooding music than is needed.
But gradually the story takes hold and, despite expectations, it doesn’t boil down to a familiar formula. It’s not a thriller, for instance, or an attempt at slice-of-life realism. Nor is it the kind of sentimental buddy movie where two damaged guys heal each other – though there are affinities with the darker portrayals of male bonding in the work of Thomas M. Wright (The Stranger), one of the producers.
There’s also a memorable climax and earlier there are two even more memorable scenes, both showcases for Pearce and mirrors of each other.
In the first, Warren gently and patiently instructs Mel on how to commit murder, despite having previously said he’s no killer himself. The second sees his assurance giving way to pathetic vulnerability as he strives to bond with his long-estranged adult son (Toby Wallace).
Rather than defining Warren once and for all, both scenes encourage further curiosity about what the character might be capable of – and about what Williams might be capable of doing with actors, whether Pearce or someone else.