THE STORY – Mel, recently transferred from juvenile to adult prison, is taken under the wing of Shepard, the country’s most hated criminal, and Warren, a soon-to-be-paroled inmate. The paternal triangle built between them spells their undoing.
THE CAST – Guy Pearce, Cosmo Jarvis, Vincent Miller, Toby Wallace & Tammy Macintosh
THE TEAM – Charles Williams (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 103 Minutes
With “Inside,” first-time feature-film director Charles Williams doesn’t just craft a prison drama — he builds a slow-burning crucible of the soul, where punishment comes not from the walls or the guards but from the echoing question of what makes a man what he is. Anchored by aching performances from newcomer Vincent Miller and Cosmo Jarvis, alongside a quietly devastating Academy Award-nominated Guy Pearce (“The Brutalist“), “Inside” burrows deep into the intergenerational scars of violence, absence, and identity. The result is a film that doesn’t concern itself with jailbreaks or corrupt wardens but rather with the prisons we carry within.
Mel (Vincent Miller), a 19-year-old who has aged out of juvenile detention, enters an adult prison carrying only photos of his mother and sister, a toy keyboard, and a life already tattooed with inevitability. His parents got married in prison, and now returning to the very place where he was conceived, Mel’s journey is framed as both literal incarceration and a spiritual reckoning. Left without visitors, family, or a clear path forward, he becomes the emotional anchor of a tense paternal triangle between two inmates: Mark Shepard (Cosmo Jarvis), a convicted murderer turned evangelical preacher, and Warren Murfett (Guy Pearce), a weary inmate one foot out the door and the other sunk deep in prison politics.
Williams, who spent four years researching the Australian penal system, takes meticulous care in every detail — from the 11% Indigenous representation in the cast (mirroring real incarceration statistics in Victoria) to the way the dynamics on the inside are captured. His lens is unflinching but not judgmental, offering a rare space for characters like Mark and Warren to exist without demand for redemption or easy villainy. Jarvis, almost unrecognizable from his recent turn in “Shogun,” imbues Mark with a haunting duality: both preacher and madman, both predator and penitent. His sermons, frequent and sometimes overindulgent in their screen time, nonetheless pierce with surprising clarity.
Meanwhile, Pearce’s Warren wears regret like a prison uniform. He’s estranged from his son and perhaps sees in Mel a version of his son he wishes he could have seen grow. Their conversations — sometimes paternal and sometimes manipulative — form the film’s emotional backbone. Warren isn’t grooming Mel for growth but for murder: a contract hit that could clear his debt and keep Mel inside, just where Mel subconsciously believes he belongs. As the film asks its characters to reflect on the moment they decided to choose the path they took, it becomes a waiting game to see which path Mel will choose this time.
Miller is a revelation. With minimal dialogue and a performance built almost entirely on withheld emotion, he becomes the film’s quiet center. His Mel is angry, soft, terrified, and resilient. In flashbacks, we see his descent not as a single act of criminality but as a mosaic of pain, pattern, and small moments where things could have gone another way.
The film is heavy with dialogue and, at times, risks losing momentum under the weight of its own introspection. But the emotional payoff is worth the slow burn. A late scene between Mel and Warren, a final, fragile communion between proxy father and son, devastates in its writing, suggesting that the strongest bonds may not be those we’re born into but those we form in our darkest hours.
“Inside” is a haunting and human film that, in quiet devastation, asks whether a soul can ever be better than how it was molded. Williams offers no easy answers — only reflections, uncomfortable truths, and a slow-building portrait of men shaped by forces far beyond their control. Warren recounts that his father used to say that the worst of men “have got a little bit of good in them, and that’ll be their undoing.” Ultimately, it’s not about who gets out or stays in. It’s about the cost of carrying good inside a place designed to crush it.
