‘Inside’ Review: Guy Pearce Is a Lit Fuse of Internal Contradictions in Haunting Australian Prison Drama

The suffocating environment of a prison system depicted with maximum authenticity makes a combustible setting for Inside, a drama exploring inherited damage via three different convicted felons, each of them trying in his own way to circumvent a fate seemingly written in their DNAs. Offering further evidence that Guy Pearce, following The Brutalist and The Shrouds, has become one of our most gifted and versatile actors, Charles Williams’ feature debut shapes a volatile triangle of broken men, fleshed out by an astonishing Cosmo Jarvis and impressive newcomer Vincent Miller.

While not directly inspired by his own experiences, Williams drew on his working-class upbringing with family members in and out of prison and a father who disappeared from his life at age 12 to shape a view that’s honest and unflinching but also tempered by compassion.

Inside is not the usual story of damnation or redemption, of the unbreakable cycles of crime or even the virtues of rehabilitation, like Sing Sing. Nor is it another attempt to grapple with the legacy of Australia’s penal colony history. Instead, it’s a bleak, often intensely heavy psychological character study, though not without fully earned glimpses of hope.

The narrator whose voiceover passages bind the drama is 18-year-old Mel Blight (Miller), who has aged out of the juvenile detention center where he killed another kid in a violent outburst. A wobbly home video shows the wedding of Mel’s mother (Georgia Chiara) and father (Angus Cerini) in the prison where the latter was serving time. He recalls his father telling him that being conceived behind bars was a sure sign that Mel would turn out bad. “And he was right.”

While prison staff admit that the situation is far from ideal, Mel is required to share a cell in his new home with Mark Shepard (Jarvis), a lifer whose conviction for the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl when he was 13 made him one of the country’s most hated criminals. Shepard, too, is a recent transfer to the lower-security facility after decades in maximum security, much of that time spent in solitary confinement.

With his hunched shoulders, shuffling gait and mumbled speech, Shepard is clearly a troubled man, his mental stability an open question. But he believes he has found a spiritual path to salvation as a born-again Pentecostal. He enlists Mel to play electronic keyboard at the religious services where he preaches to a mostly jeering assembly of prisoners. They look on slack-jawed during the moments of rapture in which he speaks in tongues.

Jarvis’ performance is transformative, making Mark both pathetic and feverishly alive, his corrosive remorse seemingly genuine. (The English Shogun star’s Oz accent is impeccable.) One scene is especially riveting, in which he indirectly explains a shocking act of self-mutilation by sharing the discovery that it’s the spirit, not the flesh, that must change. There’s remarkable empathy in Williams’ writing and direction as Mark insists that Mel needs to be baptized to free himself from pain and guilt.

The triangle’s third point is Warren Murfett (Pearce), who is days away from parole eligibility after 15 years of incarceration and every self-help program on offer. Sporting a bushy salt-and-pepper beard and a world-weary look in his eyes, Pearce finds dimensions both tragic and devious in what could have been merely the stock character of the wily long-term inmate whose isolation has cost him his humanity.

When he assaults his cellmate, a convicted pedophile Warren catches with a photo of his son as a boy, the tough warden (Tammy MacIntosh) suspects he is deliberately sabotaging his parole chances, as is often the case with prisoners who come to fear being shoved back out into the world after long sentences. As a disciplinary measure, she swaps out Mel as his cellmate, instructing Warren to keep the unpredictable livewire kid out of trouble.

Warren’s mentorship takes a tough-love approach, perhaps a reflection of his desire for reconciliation with his now-adult son, who has agreed to see him during a monitored day-release. But he also has his own selfish needs.

Deep in gambling debt and unable to pay back prison thugs unlikely to let him be released alive, Warren manipulates Mel into killing Sheperd for the bounty on his head, instructing him on how to carry out the murder while making it look like self-defense. He even fashions a shiv for Mel in the prison workshop.

Like Warren, Mel has his own motives for agreeing to the proposal, not for his share of the cash but perhaps in a cleansing attempt to rid the world of an evil human being and dissuade himself from the idea that people like him are infected with poison and should not be allowed back out into society.

In his first screen role, Miller holds his own alongside his seasoned co-stars. He smartly underplays the twitchy nervousness that causes Mel to blink constantly, instead conveying his unease in more subtle ways, swinging between rage episodes and moments of quiet in which he looks like a lost child. His suppressed hunger for connection adds to the unpredictability of Mel’s scenes with both Warren and Mark.

There’s a direct line from Miller’s performance to that of Raif Weaver as the young Mel in the most unbearably tense of his triggering flashbacks. His mother informs Mel and his sister that their father will be out on day release but urges them not to share their address with him. From the moment his dad picks Mel up from school it’s clear the boy won’t be able to keep the secret. The car journey to the house, with a sheet of plastic taped over a broken window flapping noisily, is nerve-rattling, even more so because what follows is played out offscreen.

Another standout scene — arguably Pearce’s finest work here — is Warren’s visit to the home of his son Adrian (Toby Wallace, terrific), during which his effortful geniality crumbles in the face of cold distance that builds into cruel betrayal.

It’s one of many instances in the film that force us to consider hardened criminals from different angles — as victims as well as perpetrators — and it adds shading both to the violent climactic developments and the surprising optimism of a poignant coda.

Inside is not an easy movie. Its feeling of claustrophobia is amplified by the discomfit of being confined with messed-up men liable to do anything, and its brooding mood is deepened by the chilly, institutional blues and grays of Andrew Commis’ cinematography and the enveloping somberness of Chiara Costanza’s synth score. But the superbly acted drama yields rewards, making astute observations about mental health, inherited trauma, self-determination and absent or unfixable fathers.