Prison dramas usually fall into three categories: They’re either tales of violent intrigue, redemption or a rocky road through one to the other. “Inside” has a different feel, since its primary conflicts are mostly internal.
The central trio of inmates in Australian writer-director Charles Williams’ first feature are each consumed with guilt for the crimes that got them here. In different ways, each of them doubts they even deserve another shot at freedom. With Guy Pearce and Cosmo Jarvis as the two older convicts opposite newcomer Vincent Miller, “Inside” is a strongly acted piece that compels attention despite the occasional murky plot point. After premiering at the Melbourne Festival last summer, it played Tribeca a week before its U.S. release by Quiver Distribution.
An opening home movie shows a wedding taking place in prison, between the future parents of aptly named Mel Blight (Miller) — at this point he’s just a baby bump sported by his mother through the ceremony, conceived during a conjugal visit. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from there. By the time the father is paroled, his family is already in hiding from his extreme volatility. He finds them nonetheless, to catastrophic results that leave Mel alone and in juvenile lockup by age 12. His own rage episodes ensure that upon reaching adulthood, he’s simply transferred to an adult facility.
There, his first cellmate is the older, very odd Mark (Jarvis). He’s just been moved from decades in maximum security, where he’d been ever since committing “one of the worst crimes this country has ever seen” (as a TV report puts it) when he was just 13. As that deed involved child rape and murder, the general population here doesn’t want him among them any more than the public wants him at liberty. But highly damaged Mark, whose upbringing was evidently a nightmare of abuse, has found salvation, or at least escape: He’s ordained himself a servant of the Lord, holding improvisational services in the prison chapel to a paltry flock. Mark ropes keyboard player Mel into providing musical accompaniment, hoping to gain an acolyte.
But the new fish doesn’t want to be “saved.” Deliberately imperiling his chances of release, he creates a ruckus in a rehabilitation class. This gets the attention of Warren (Pearce), a longtime inmate who desperately wants parole — particularly now that a son he hasn’t communicated with for years has restarted contact. But Warren has incurred debts toward other prisoners, a dangerous predicament given that he has no way to pay them off. He finagles his way into an alliance with Mel, intending to get that impressionable boy to kill Mark, who has a price on his head — one Warren aims to collect without soiling his own hands.
Williams affords glimpses of these characters’ pasts via flashbacks scattered throughout, though they don’t by any means make those histories fully understood. It can also be hard at times for non-Aussie viewers to grasp everything explained in dialogue, since the accents are thick and Jarvis lends Mark a strangled voice presumably born of damage incurred in some formative beat-down.
What does eventually become clear is that all our protagonists have done things they may never be able to forgive themselves for. In Pearce’s excellent performance, Warren emerges a canny manipulator and former trainwreck who’s nonetheless persuaded himself he deserves a second chance. That belief gets dashed in a memorable late scene when he’s permitted a day pass to visit his now-adult son (Toby Wallace), who turns out to have a very different agenda for their reunion.
Chameleonic Jarvis makes Mark so out-there physically and behaviorally that we can only guess at the depth of his lifelong estrangement from humanity — but it makes sense he’d seek transcendence on a spiritual plane of his own eccentric making. These two figures might be able to temporarily cover for their core feelings of self-loathing, but Mel hasn’t acquired that skill yet. If Miller’s wide-eyed turn leaves him more of a blank slate than necessary, that works well enough for a character who just might still have a shot at one day becoming a whole, functional person.
“Inside” has a suspense hook to drive it forward and a climactic violent set piece, if not quite the one we were expecting. But the question of who’s going to kill or get killed ultimately proves less important than how their pasts have shaped these men — or rather trapped them, like quicksand. An early sequence shows numerous convicts in a sort of group therapy session, and it’s immediately obvious that the sole life lesson they’ve all absorbed is of their own worthlessness. There’s no case-pleading tenor here, though; Williams eschews sentimentality just as he does the more lurid criminal melodramatics of “Oz” and nearly every prior screen “big house” narrative.
That evasion of prison movie clichés extends to the aesthetics, which to an extent are determined by location. Using a real-life incarceration facility near Geelong in Victoria that had just opened (but wasn’t populated yet), Williams has a setting that’s sunny and modern, not inherently depressing if not exactly pleasant, either. The design contributions are more notable for their judicious neutrality than any conspicuous style, though Chiara Costanza’s original score adds another atypical flavor. She sticks to the rather ethereal sounds Mark prefers Mel to play during his services — a yearning for New Ages-style ascendance rather than the thundering organ chords of traditional church music.