Conceived inside, born inside and back behind bars

Striking debut feature Inside is a coming-of-age story about a young man torn between two fatally flawed father figures.

Cosmo Jarvis and Vincent Miller in Inside.

This critic has seen the inside of every jail in NSW. No, it’s not because I was sent down for not loving Frank Darabont’s 1994 movie The Shawshank Redemption. It’s because I did a stretch working for the justice minister in the NSW government.

I mention this as background to Charles Williams’s striking debut feature film Inside, set in an Australian prison. This movie, featuring 2025 Oscar nominee Guy Pearce, is not a standard jailhouse drama.

There is less visible violence than there was in the jails I knew. My phone rang each morning for a briefing from prison HQ. When the call came at 4am I knew I’d have to wake the minister and we had a bad day before us.

This is a purposeful decision on the director’s part. We know prisons are grim places full of despair. That’s not the story he wants to tell. Instead he offers a coming-of-age story in which a troubled young man is torn between two fatally flawed father figures. “Mum said I got made in prison, so maybe it was always going to go this way.”

That’s the opening line from the young man, Mel Blight (a compelling Vincent Miller), who on turning 18 has been transferred from a juvenile detention centre to an adult prison.

His parents married in prison. A documentary-style opening sequence shows an ultrasound of him in his mother’s womb. He was conceived inside, born inside and returned inside after killing a boy who bullied him.

The father figures are Mark Shepard (British actor Cosmo Jarvis, from the recent television series Shogun, who has no trouble with the Australian accent) and Warren Murfett (Pearce).

Shepard committed “one of the worst crimes this country has seen” when he was 13 and is in for life. Murfett killed someone in a hit-and-run and is up for parole.

So the violence is there but it’s mostly alluded to rather than shown. When it is shown, as the plot develops, it is true to life and therefore horrific.

Shepard has found god. He delivers sermons – inmates turn up because there’s not much else to do – and speaks in tongues. He asks Blight, who plays a keyboard, to add music to the messiah mix and promises him he will be forgiven for his sins.

Murfett is in deep debt to the prison bookie. When it becomes known that Shepard’s victim’s family has put a price on his head, Murfett comes up with a plan.

He’ll organise the hit, Blight will do the actual killing and they will split the proceeds. Blight agrees. What follows is a physical and emotional triangle between a killer with a child’s face, a psychopath who thinks he is the saviour and a deadbeat drunk out to save his own arse. There are moments of rage and yet also moments of tenderness.

All the performances are strong, especially Miller and Jarvis. Toby Wallace, so good as The Kid in the 2023 film The Bikeriders, has a powerful supporting role as Murfett’s estranged son. Most of the other supporting cast are non-actor former inmates the director found via support groups.

The director avoids the common trope that the real baddie is the prison system itself. He also explores an under-explored theme: prisoners who want to remain inside and do what they can to blow their chances of parole.

When a prison officer notes that her previous job was in childcare and nothing much has changed, it’s believable. All the men are inside. Are they there because of what is inside them? Do they want to get out, physically and psychologically?

If you are interested in this subject, in what it’s like to exist in a real prison for more than four decades, go to the online magazine Spin and search for the interview-with-a-lifer piece titled Life in Hell (www.spin.com). It’s well worth the read.

Williams won the short film Palme d’Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival for Little Creatures, which also touches on paternal authority. This debut feature was named best film at the AWGIE Awards in February, beating rivals such as the $100m Robbie Williams biopic A Better Man. It marks him as a filmmaker to watch.

Inside (M)

104 minutes

In cinemas

★★★★