Inside (2007) *contains spoilers

[whitezombie]

I rented this DVD on the same weekend as I watched Martyrs. I decided to watch Martyrs first, as I'd read that this was the film that provided the biggest gutpunch, of the two. Boy was I wrong!

I'll not go into any details of the story, as I'm sure you can read this elsewhere.

Despite the fact that not very long is spent introducing and establishing the characters, I nevertheless felt that enough time was spent so that you at least care for and identifty with the main character, if not with some of the peripheral characters. By the end, I also felt some amount of sympathy even for the 'baddie'.

The atmosphere throughout is pretty much edge-of-the-seat, and kept that way thanks in part to the lighting, and the fact that, once the action starts, it doesn't let up.

For the most part, I find that a fair few of the foreign language films' special effects don't stand up to closer scrutiny due no doubt to the fact that the budget is tighter than your average Hollywood blockbuster, and most probably the average English-language film, simply due to the number of people who can watch it in it's native language.
A recent example, where I thought the special effects let the film down was Martyrs.
This, however, is most definitely not the case with Inside. With the odd exception (the main character's nightmare sequence perhaps, which looks a bit too CGI), the effects are VERY well done, and very gruesome. At some points we were wincing and pleading with the 'baddie' not to go through with what were some of the more extreme parts of the film.

Overall, I'd highly recommend this, if you have the stomach for it (pun intended ). I'm very picking with my film scores, and haven't given an 8/10 since, well, Ok, since Monsters, but before that, it had been a while.

A well deserved, 8/10.
I'm not quite sure what can top this in terms of extreme, visceral violence, and not sure I want to know!