Deft Dafoe turns primal in art heist gone disturbingly wrong
“Art is for keeps.” This turn of phrase — uttered by Willem Dafoe’s character Nemo in Vasilis Katsoupis’ narrative directorial debut “Inside” — is a bedeviling little saying of multilayered meaning. It rattles around in your brain like a pinball, much in the way Nemo rattles around the luxury apartment where he’s trapped after an art heist gone wrong.
“Art is for keeps.” It speaks to the way we place value on art, and it’s also a cheeky taunt as Nemo helps himself to million-dollar works of modern art in the penthouse apartment of a wealthy art collector. Later, it’s a statement that will haunt and even threaten Nemo, alone, in an increasingly dire survivalist situation, with only art to nourish him.
“Inside,” written by Ben Hopkins (from a concept by Katsoupis), pits the most primal elements of humanity against the most advanced to tease out the contradictory and alienating nature of our world. A coolly discerning camera takes in the apartment of this wealthy collector, away in Kazakhstan, as Nemo breaks in, overriding the security panel with codes fed to him by his partner on a walkie-talkie. Unable to locate a specific painting, he attempts to escape, but the security system malfunctions and he’s trapped inside the apartment, a heavy door sealing the vault.
There’s a certain suspension of disbelief required to believe that there’s truly no way out. But this highly automated smart home is so technologically advanced there’s not even a phone, computer or access to the outside. It’s a luxurious prison filled with priceless works of art whose value becomes null in this situation — you can’t eat art, after all.
But Katsoupis and Hopkins don’t undercut the value of artistic expression entirely. Nemo devolves in this nightmarish quarantine — first adapting, then struggling, battling the elements as the glitching home automation system blasts him with heat, then freezing cold. The water has been turned off, and he resorts to collecting from the automated indoor sprinklers and licking moisture from the freezer. He dines on caviar before he starves, turning a hungry eye toward the exotic fish that swim in their tank.
It’s “Survivor: Penthouse Apartment,” and it maps onto our 2020 experience of quarantine, and explores some of the trauma that comes from this kind of isolation and alienation engendered by technology, which is intended to make our lives more comfortable but, more often than not, keeps us apart.
Nemo’s desire for connection and expression doesn’t die. He develops parasocial relationships with the building staff on the security monitors, unable to cry out to them. He eventually devolves into a sort of Early Man type, scrawling on the walls, creating strange altars, developing an almost religious fervor in his isolation. Katsoupis calls into question the overly inflated value of art while reminding us that expression sits on our hierarchy of needs closer to the more immediate, ones than we might assume.
Katsoupis poses these probing questions about humanity, but doesn’t offer any clear answers. Rather, he lets his muse, Dafoe, simply inhabit this harrowing journey of humanity in a performance that is simultaneously primitive and transcendent. Nemo becomes a figure straight out of Greek mythology, reckoning with the forces of creation and destruction, but it’s unclear if he’s Sisyphus, Prometheus or perhaps even Icarus.
MPA rating: R (for language, some sexual content and nude images)
Running time: 1:45
How to watch: In theaters March 17