On DVD - Knocked over by Charles Williams INSIDE (Australia, 2024)

Charles Williams

Clearly  I wasn't paying attention. After I watched a DVD copy of Charles Williams Inside (copy on DVD passed to me by a friend) I went back to Wikipedia to discover that Williams grew up in country Victoria. At the age of 19, he made his first short film I Can’t Get Started, which won the Best Director award at Tropfest.  He went on to write and direct the short films The Cow Thief , Home and All These Creatures.  The last named screened at over 180 international film festivals and went on to win more than 60 international awards including the AACTA  Award for Best Short Film.

Six years later Charles Williams made Inside,  a rather extraordinary prison drama which for starters makes you wonder how he managed to write a script of such complete authenticity. Presumably he didn't spend any of the time between his Palme d'Or and his feature debut cooling his heels in some slammer somewhere.

Whatever the explanation, beyond the usual indifference of Australia's film funding bodies towards supporting talent in a way that allows them to get on with making their movies, Charles Williams has given us what might be the best debut feature in who knows how long. 

Warren (Guy Pearce), Mel (Vincent Miller), Inside

He may have got the bit of luck he needed when Guy Pearce agreed to be in the movie and play Warren Murfett, a wilfully disturbing character, prone to inexplicable violence and, as his parole approaches after a lengthy sentence, utterly fearful of returning to a 'normal' world where he knows or fears that his first steps are likely to be towards a resumption of his addictions. The saddest scene in the movie is the quite long sequence when Warren, on his first day release visits his son and  (spoiler alert), the son takes cold revenge on a father who neglected him for decades.  

There is some other brilliant casting as well. Cosmo Jarvis as a murderer and long term inmate who has got religion and starts conducting services for his fellow prisoners. It's a performance that requires a lot of acting smarts, or technique I guess, and again it's a character on the edge. Also on the edge is the young Mel, who killed another kid at age 12 and is still in the prison system a decade later. 

Mark (Cosmo Jarvis), Inside

It's tough stuff and to be frank hardly likely to be Saturday night entertainment. But ....really gripping and the movie of someone who should be of those few whom the funding bodies should be hurling money at so they keep working at a clip and not wait another six years to go round again.