UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

"Inside" and "What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?" 

- ANTHONY LANE

The hero of "Inside," a new film directed by Vasilis Katsoupis, is apparently called Nemo, though I never caught the name. All I know is that he's a thief, and that he's played by Willem Dafoe. As the story commences, a helicopter deposits Nemo onto the roof of a tall building in New York. From the fact that the chopper is heard but not seen, you will gather that "Inside" is not blessed with an inexhaustible budget. Here is an art-house flick, cunningly coated in the gleam of a high-tech thriller.

And what an art house. Nemo breaks into a top-floor apartment, which looks more like a gallery than a home. It belongs to a man of evident wealth and slightly uncertain taste, who is away in Kazakhstan. Hanging on the walls-or, in the case of video installations, projected onto screens-are multiple works of modern art, mostly of recent vintage. The oldest are by Egon Schiele, and it is these that Nemo has come to steal, presumably so that they can be passed on to another Croesus. Swift and feline, Nemo gathers all but one of the Schieles and prepares to depart, where-upon the security system locks the doors and shuts him in. He must spend the rest of the film alone, aloft, unmissed, and unlamented. Think Rapunzel without the hair.

It's not hard to spot the wily ways in which Katsoupis and his screenwriter, Ben Hopkins, rig the plot. The gas and the water have been switched off in the apartment, meaning that Nemo can't cook any food or flush the toilet. The electricity, on the other hand, remains on, so he is able to admire a glowing blue neon sign another piece of art-that reads "all the time that will come after this moment."The fridge, too, is in use: there's an amazing shot of Nemo, parched and desperate, inserting his head into the icebox and licking the chilly moisture from the sides. Oh, and the phone that connects him to the lobby of the building is out of order. Of course it is.