À l'intérieur (Inside)

A classic 'innocent stalked by a killer' film. A young pregnant girl is menaced in her home by strange woman.

I can honestly say that I can't think I've ever seen a more violent movie. The film takes no prisoners. Beatrice Dalle (she of Betty Blue fame), wearing black and a demonic expression, does brutal damage to anyone she comes across in this French thriller. Stabbings, throat cutting, eye-gouging, shootings, exploding heads, and you name it. It's all on show. Dalle is not so much a character, as an unrelenting primal force, fuelled by an incoherent rage. It's obvious from the beginning what the stranger wants, but it is not until the end, that we find out why she has chosen this particular victim to torment.

The two directors, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, make David Cronenberg look restrained, and perhaps a little restraint would have been helpful. The final scenes, where the floors are awash in blood and corpses are strewn about place as if in a Jacobean tragedy, borders on slapstick comedy. Having started the film with extreme violence, the filmmakers leave themselves little option but to go further and further, until the situation becomes absurd.

Despite these flaws, Inside is a terrific thriller, and a refreshing antidote to the many bland US horror remakes that have infested the multiplexes lately.