Avaliações do Metacritic

Everything is glued together by another Dafoe performance that proves he’s one of the greatest actors of all time, especially when given enough room to tap into the lunacy of his characters. In short, Katsoupis managed to craft a crowd pleaser that still has something interesting to say.

Inside is set up as a psychological thriller/escape movie, but evolves into something rather more intriguing: a philosophical interrogation of the value of art to a dying man.

The wretched allure of this process makes “Inside” worth the investment even when Katsoupis proves unable to resist the charming hands of cliché, bloating the script to serve the idea of an unconventional heist movie, when in his hands lie a much more interesting proposition.

As Katsoupis’s exhibitionist experiment teeters between prickly psychological suspense and yawing pretension, it’s always Dafoe — perhaps channeling the audacious immersion of his roots in Wooster Group theater — who mesmerizingly portrays this “Inside” job as if his life and art counted on it.

Whether or not Vasilis Katsoupis’s film achieves escape velocity from genre limitations though overt sociopolitical commentary is questionable.

It is a strange, enclosed experience: Dafoe’s mastery of the screen keeps it meaningful.

Without an actor like Dafoe at its center (and margins and everywhere else), it would be unwatchable torture. With him, it’s more like watchable torture, easier to admire than enjoy.

Dafoe is captivating as always, but not even his slinking, slippery presence can save the film from turning into a rather torturous endurance test.

It’s a natty-enough twist on the survivor story — what if you were stuck inside, not outside? — and one bolstered by the inherent watchability of star Willem Dafoe, one of the few performers absolutely up to the task of this particular feature.

Even the formidable Dafoe at his most intense ultimately can’t stop Inside from succumbing to its own narrowness, devolving into a self-reflexive portrait of soul-sucking isolation.