A pair of American lovers find themselves trapped in a sinister scenario
when they take a job as groundskeepers at a French estate.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Renata Gabryjelska
Starring: Andrea Tivadar, Tom Ainsley, Steven Brand, Joanna Kulig
When you think of European thrillers of the 1970s and '80s you think of
logic defying narratives, an abundance of style and actors of various
nationalities performing with dodgy accents. Polish director
Renata Gabryjelska's featue debut Safe Inside feels
like a throwback to such an era, though it's sadly nowhere near as fun
as your classic euro-thriller. It's daft as a brush but insists on
playing its silly premise with a straight face, right down to ending
with a wedge of text that tries to convince us the madness we just
witnessed is grounded in some sort of scientific fact.
The film opens quite conventionally, as young American couple Ana (Andrea Tivadar) and Tom (Tom Ainsley) arrive at the rural French estate of
Richard (Steven Brand), who has hired them to tend to the grounds
for €200 a day. Immediately, Tom starts treating his host/employer in
the most obnoxious fashion imaginable, spurred perhaps by jealousy, as
Ana seems won over by Richard's cultured European ways.
Richard is essentially a modern cousin of the sort of rich eccentrics
played by Bela Lugosi and George Zucco in 1930s programmers. He's
certainly dapper, but there's something not quite right about him.
What's he hiding in the barn, which he commands Ana to stay away from?
Why are all the books in his library incomplete? Why do the records in
his vinyl collection refuse to play more than mere snippets of
songs?
The answer, when it comes, is actually quite intriguing. Without
spoiling things, let's just say the movie takes a turn into the type of
premise Christopher Nolan might wish he had thought of. On the evidence
of her debut, Gabryjelska is no Nolan however, and she struggles to
communicate the rules of the fantasy world her protagonists find
themselves in. We're left scratching our heads as to how all this is
happening, and when we're given answers we're only confused even
further.
For this sort of storytelling to work, the movie needs to double down
on its insanity. We're dealing with a sort of dream logic here, which
gives a filmmaker a lot of creative licence to go all out on the crazy
visuals. Gabryjelska appears to have no such stylistic inclinations, and
her movie maintains its bland soap opera aesthetic throughout.
It doesn't help that aside from Brand, who admittedly doesn't convince
as a Frenchman, the acting is amateurish here. Tivadar is a
British-Romanian actress whose American accent continually cracks
mid-sentence, and she rarely conveys the distress her character is
under. Fellow Brit Ainsley pulls off a decent US accent but he seems
uncomfortable with dialogue that very much feels like it's been written
by someone for whom English is a second language. With its knockout
twist, Safe Inside probably sounded like a winner in a
pitch meeting, but the resulting feature film fails to capitalise on its
potential, and like its young protagonists, you'll probably want to
leave its environs early.
