As a trans person the body is the house, pre-transition for it is shelter but breakable, reliable but movable, fixed yet hopefully, maybe, unknowingly fluid in design and purpose, only after you transitioned does body start to feel like body, something that doesn't just house you but suppose to and at last made you; you.
The real question of course then becomes, now that the body is a body, what then becomes of the house? Before and now after.
**The REAL monster of INSIDE**
INSIDE more than any other movie I've seen, besides funnily enough Martyrs (which is better than this but still), not many has make me think about what a house means, here especially within two contexts, as a French Extremity film but also as a film about motherhood. In a sense Sarah's lost is rippled in how she gradually loses the house as a sancturary, a promise ideal of what a safe space is supposed to be but also what motherhood is suppose to be. Without a husband, someone to help her raise the child, Sarah in particular is clearly unhappy with her pregnancy, much like how this one person can undo everything that a house is suppose to be, so does the absence of the husband, changing the meaning of her giving life as less a promise for a future but a curse. Which makes the costuming here, especially how our antagonist sports a corset and a long, black gown, like a witch more interesting. There is a lot to be said for how unwieldy the power imbalance and who gets the control swings wildly from one another throughout the majority of the film's exercise in thriller horror.
Unlike other terrifying home intruders before her, Beatrice Dalle's Woman lacks any plan or commitment or as most home invasion films often portray, a mystique to the invaders whereas here Woman is human, although pushing the lines a bit with how ruthless she is with her actions and aim but zooming out to the larger picture, it’s how she abruptly and on spot goes with the flow of the situation and generally, her act here seems more of a spontaneous, mental and emotional nature, mostly due to a breakdown then it is a thought out, coordinated scheme albeit one that while not fully clear especially how in one moment she wants the baby to herself and at other points wants to kill it, this rage has clearly been spewing inside of her for a long time.
So does the melancholy of Sarah because if Woman could represent the Witch, Sarah is the everyday woman, the Mother. strangely enough though despite our situation of course being drastically different, maybe it has something to do with the fact that I was in a minor car accident myself recently which got me to start thinking a lot about life and death, but I also share her melancholy for the opposite reason, with how I know I am not gonna be able to get pregnant, to gift life to my baby if I were to have one and definitely one of my biggest regrets in life was how I let dysphoria, depression and all of that convince me not to have my sperm preserved. Just in case but, I digress. However one of Inside's biggest problems, what really dates it in fact is the baby, shots from inside where a CGI baby feels and reacts to whats happening to his mother from the outside, on one level, it further heightens the intensity and impact of each cut, bruise, stab and painful attempts to stay alive, the kind of brutal visceral, uncompromising expressions of pain that make me love disturbing films in the first place as a trans person especially when I hadn't yet discover who I was.
When I constantly look to extreme films in order to feel something, feel violent, screaming, exploding sensations and articulation of how its suppose to all feel pass the dysphoric numbness and entrapment. Meanwhile of course body horror was how I explore my own discomfort with how my body was back then, the baby arguably serves such a purpose as well, how it renders you weaker, vulnerable and much of the sadism and horror here lies in the fact that the target is not the mother but whats inside of her and how the Woman is willing to do just about anything to rip it out of her. But on a lesser but still uncertain note, there is a argument to be made here that the film is anti abortionist to a certain degree with how it treats the baby on a visual and narrative level, even if on a thematic and metaphorical one the baby is important for what it represents as again this spectrum between the future as hope and the future as cursed (by the end the baby's fate is unclear but its what he represents that matters) but ultimately the way this highlights the passivity of the baby as a characteristic, a living trait is way too "please care because it is a innocent living creature" and the thing is I don't think its done with that intention fully but more so because admittedly I do think what the film has to say, its thematic underbelly if you will is only really there to serve as shock value then as heft, the creative decisions thus follows suit in mentally and execution because yeah.
Opening this the way it does is such a simple, almost elegant (besides from the poor CGI, otherwise strong concept) but also shocking and a punch to the gut to start the film with, especially in retrospect but this opening scene is also a great example of how strained and manipulative the articulation here is, how it misleads us to think one thing is happening when actually another thing is and to someone else which right away was predictable (including a unanswered question raised near the end). I do like my disturbing fucked up movies to have as much philosphical, emotional and conceptual disturbance as it does, visual, sensory or the gruesomes, thats what seperates French Extremity from I feel the other disturbing films out there but for Inside, that meat feels like a obligation then a full commitment, like I would personally love to see how a woman might reimagine this if giving the chance to direct and write.
Thats absolutely one of the appeal of Inside, for a while now I've been wanting to get back to disturbing, extreme horror films but to answer the question I proposed at the start, being more in tuned with my body, my feminity also means I am more aware, more sensitive which is a great thing, makes me wanna challenge my tolerance more even but there is a limit, once you've been assaulted yourself and have to work as a sex worker as I have, its just refreshing to be able to watch something like Inside where atleast the pain directed at a woman is not from a man but from another woman. It is here where I am able to get my catharsis again.
In the film I see especially, how as a trans woman I am expected, sometimes demanded or downright forced to follow traditional gender roles in order to "pass" or to be "worthy" of my womanhood when really, all women, we just wanna be ourselves, whatever our version of womanhood means, it is as valid and as correct as any other, but specifically the enforced types of womanhood are and there is something subtle but also sad about the fact that our villain here, seemingly doesn't have much to hold onto other then the idea of bearing a child, her background is unknown but I like to think its due to maybe her being raised, like all woman, cis or trans or non binary, to believe or atleast hear that one of the most important things about being a woman is to be a mother. For better and for worst, Inside, for however flawed it may be in its rough, unbounded, horrifying and unruly play (at once making for a undeniably disturbing surface, just the idea of a home invasion like this is scary, man or woman but once more a contradicting, undecided under). It at least treats Motherhood as what it is both by its sharp execution and uneven handling, as something important but ever shifting, definable but also humanly flexible, idealized as it is gruesome nightmare, isolating as it is shared especially in who is a mother, what act, when, how does one become moms, and despite what any Puritan, idealogical nonsense may wanna show or hide, Inside embraces the most sensory truth of all; it is FUCKING PAINFUL and INTENSE. That’s why it’s valid to be a mother and why it is completely fine not to want to be one, period.
