by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Vincent Miller, Guy Pearce, Cosmo Jarvis, Toby Wallace, Tammy Macintosh, Chloe Hayden
Intro:
Anchored by a steadfast refusal to sensationalise or condescend about the realities of the prison system, and filled with truly astounding performances from all involved…
Hurt people hurt people.
It seems weirdly simple when phrased like that. Bad actions bloom from the seeds of other bad actions inflicted upon us. It’s the kind of aphorism designed to introduce some form of empathy towards people that are responsible for varyingly awful things, and to an extent, there is truth to it.
However, when looked at plainly, it’s a closed loop. Two words repeated that just feed into each other ad infinitum. The causality is evident, but nothing outside of itself; no means of breaking it. It observes the situation as it stands, not a way to change it.
That cycle, of the hurt inflicting hurt, is at the center of Inside, a prison drama that marks Melbourne writer/director Charles Williams’ feature debut. The story follows young offender Mel (Vincent Miller) as he enters the mainstream prison system and finds himself under the reluctant guidance of two inmates: Mark (Cosmo Jarvis) and Warren (Guy Pearce).
Across its runtime, the script delicately adds layers onto the big question of why these three are behind bars, with the actual offence serving as just the starting point.
While the recidivism rates within Western prison systems could have given this some easy push towards catharsis, that ends up being a footnote compared to the larger discussions about familial influence, childhood trauma, and aggression as a form of masculine expression.
Mel just tries to serve his time, doing what will make him look the best for the parole boards, until he is given an ultimatum: Mark has to die.
The film initially flirts with presenting Mark and Warren as the angel and devil on Mel’s shoulders, except the framing cuts through any such pretence. Cosmo Jarvis returns to his affecting work in Calm with Horses, eerily comfortable in this environment, portraying what is basically an Ocker version of Michael Myers if he became born again. As he leads his fellow inmates in church service, the use of faith as a means of absolving personal responsibility comes face-to-face with the fact that, through everything that has happened, Mark is still that child. A child that has been branded the nation’s single worst criminal, but still a child.
When Tammy Macintosh’s warden remarks about previously working in childcare and how familiar this all is (initially as a backhander to Warren), that first giggle gives way to the feeling of hope falling off your body like flecks of paint from the prison walls.
And then there’s Warren himself, whose self-serving actions and motives are undercut by a genuine want to do right by at least someone in his life; namely, his son (Toby Wallace). Within the bigger depiction of the institutionalised, that duality adds a lot to the pervasive feeling of inescapable dread (as does Pearce’s terrifically grounded performance), and along with the darker shades of Shawshank Redemption in his (and the film’s) perspective on prison rehabilitation, seeing him on parole and witnessing the actual result of his actions… again, like flecks of paint.
And in the midst of all this is Mel, a teenager staring into a hole that feels like it was made just for him. Miller’s performance is what really ties this all together, as between the two forces and their respective forms of escape from their actions, it’s Mel who receives the brunt of the film’s cerebral scar tissue. His depiction of PTSD, borne from two equally harrowing childhood events, hits like a concrete block to the face, and it matches the film’s overall utter lack of compromise. It shows a broken system full of broken people, and while it doesn’t actively push either end into being the defacto ‘problem’ with the big picture, it instead just… shows how tragic this all is. A Stygian hamster wheel, the promise of being made whole again dangled like a carrot on a stick, that just ends up making the wheel feel like home.
The film itself doesn’t end up containing any major revelations about how to fix such things (and to be brutally honest, it is far too much to ask of a piece of popular media to offer such solutions in the first place), but with how down-to-earth and honest it is, without making the systemic cruelty into just grief spectacle for the better-off, there’s a humanising element to it that lives up to the ideal reading of the quote at the top of this review. Hurt people hurt people… but they are still people.
Inside, even as a product of a national culture that gorges itself on criminal stories (it’s basically the Australian genre), stands out through sheer force of bleakness and clarity. Anchored by a steadfast refusal to sensationalise or condescend about the realities of the prison system, and filled with truly astounding performances from all involved, it is an immersive and depressive work that tells its biggest truths not by monologuing about the injustice of it all, but by carefully and patiently etching out the characters that exist in this space. It asks a fair bit of the audience’s emotional stamina and capacity to empathise, but underneath its dour understanding of the world under correction, there’s a glint of humane hope that the loop can be cracked, possibly even broken.
