Cult Review: Burning Inside

As a preface to this review, I'd like to apologize for having this one on my plate for about a month now and not doing anything with it. It's been one hell of a busy summer, though I've finally gotten around to some write-ups I've been meaning to do. But now, on with the review of one of the most wholly original pieces of horror that I've seen in a long time. Independent filmmaker (independent is almost an understatement here, though the word itself has kind of broadened in the past few years) Nathan Wrann has constructed a work of genre cinema that goes above and beyond what fans of underground film expect these days. Wearing his influences right on his sleeve, Wrann recalls midnight classics of yesteryear while pushing his story with enough confidence and imagination to make it an entirely unique film.

Clearly taking a tip from movies like Night of the Living Dead and David Lynch's Eraserhead, Wrann's Burning Inside is a slow, cold, and calculating revenge thriller that is, while influenced by its predecessors, truly unlike anything that's come before it. With that said, I should warn casual movies goers that the film's payoff is not in the typical revenge-movie fare of a protagonist being beaten within an inch of his life only to come back and wreak havoc on his captors tenfold. The film relies much more heavily on camera use and atmosphere to take us to a much darker place, as we essentially follow our hero down the rabbit hole into one of the more shocking third acts I've seen from movies like this.

The film begins with an overhead shot of John Doe, immobile on a hospital bed as a nurse tends to him. Wrann makes no hesitation in immediately setting us up and preparing us for what the rest of the film will feel like. The first shot lasts several minutes, contains no dialogue, and abruptly switches from full color to black and white a couple minutes in. The rest of the movie remains in a grainy, and at points deliberately over-exposed black and white, and the dialogue barely picks up after the film's opening sequence. It burns slow, and sears its way into the viewer's mind. Wrann is careful to hypnotize us, only to take us further into the psyche of his character. There are moments, however, where shots either become so long or tedious that it's somewhat removing. Despite being able to respect what effect the director was trying to achieve, I feel like viewers might find themselves growing impatient with some of the movies longer sequences. The film's overall effect remains untampered though.

The movie continues as John Doe awakens from an apparent coma and we learn of his condition. He remembers nothing of what happened before the coma, and despite feeble attempts by two officers and a psychiatrist to question him and gain some insight, he is completely unresponsive. It is only when he is able to draw an elaborate mural on the wall of his room does his sympathetic nurse take a real interest. Against the hospital's wishes, she takes him outside to see if he can jog his memory and return to the place that he drew in such detail. The two arrive at a small house in the woods that John apparently remembers quite well. Driven by an almost insatiable need to discover what happened to the man she is apparently falling for very quickly, the nurse settles into the house with John. From here, John's days become a dream state, and thanks to some clever editing, and, again, some wonderful camerawork, it almost feels like watching a dream unfold. He lives from day to day in a haze, desperately searching for who he was, and the nurse sticks by, but slowly starts to understand just how disconnected John really is.

From here, as the secrets are unravelled, we come closer and closer to a certain climax, that actually remains pretty calm, turning any of the film's violence into a necessary point of closure not only for the movie but for the character. This is what Wrann has done so well with Burning Inside, taking many previous ideas of how and why revenge should be carried out, and literally turning them upside down, by making the actual violence completely secondary to the personal and emotional story. The movie gets inside your head to put you inside the character's head, and forces you to understand just how much darker this character's psyche is opposed to any of the acts he's committing. John Doe is quite simply locked in a world that he himself has created, and despite his own actions and interactions with the people and world around him, they make no difference to his own personal story. Wrann has done a terrific job at telling a tale entire from his character's point of view, despite how disturbed and emotionally ruined his character might be.

Burning Inside is, by the simplest definition, a revenge movie, but also carefully examines a loss of personal identity to the point of madness. It ignores the motions of the typical revenge thriller, and instead paints the portrait of one man's head, utilizing a terrificly eerie soundscape and black and white photography to put his audience into the mind of John Doe. The film's violence, while shocking, is actually entirely necessary, and doesn't serve only as a staple of the genre. Despite its character though, and despite any personal interpretation, Burning Inside is, at its heart, a true midnight movie like the classics that came before it. It's difficult to watch for anyone not in tune with this kind of cinema, but for those who crave the underground, the dark, and the twisted, this one is for you. Nathan Wrann knows who his audience is, and this little flick seems to have been made in their honor.

VERDICT: 7.5/10
-William Gutheil