There’s a moment in Inside—brief, still, almost imperceptible—when Mark Shepard, a lifer whose name still echoes in the headlines of Australia’s darkest tragedies, stands in the prison chapel and stares into space. Not at the cross. Not at the men. Not at himself. Just space. It isn’t remorse. It isn’t peace. It’s something emptier. A vacancy. And that, more than any single plot point, is what Inside wrestles with: what remains when the reckoning is supposed to be over—but isn’t.
Set in a low-security Australian facility cut off from time and mercy, Inside isn’t a prison drama in the traditional sense. There are no riot scenes, no violent crescendo, no redemptive speech that wraps everything in a bow. Instead, what Charles Williams gives us is something far more uncomfortable: a slow, unflinching psychological autopsy of damaged men in a system that demands they heal before it’s willing to release them—whether they know how to or not.
Mark is a born-again Christian, and the prison’s chapel leader. Once notorious for the murder of a young girl when he was just thirteen, he now walks with the confidence of a man who believes he’s been forgiven. His sermons aren’t subtle. He preaches that the crimes they committed aren’t really their fault—that they didn’t ask to be put in these bodies, or born with their urges, or wired the way they were. According to Mark, it’s not sin that defines them—it’s design. And since none of them made themselves, they shouldn't be held to account for what they became.
It’s an idea so outlandish it should be easy to dismiss. But it isn’t. Not when it’s spoken with such soft-spoken conviction. Not when it comes from a man who seems to believe it with his whole being. Cosmo Jarvis plays Mark with a strange blend of warmth and menace—like a man desperately holding together a philosophy that keeps him from shattering completely. His performance is transfixing. You can’t trust him. But you want to.
Into Mark’s orbit comes Mel, a young inmate recently moved from juvenile detention, silent and unreadable. As part of his preparation for parole, he’s required to write a letter to the family of the boy he accidentally killed. Not to ask for forgiveness, but to acknowledge what he did. To sit in the fire of it. The letter is heard in voiceover—clinical, reflective, almost cold. And yet underneath it is a brutal honesty that lingers long after the words stop. It’s not a performance. It’s a wound being named.
Mel barely speaks. He doesn’t posture, doesn’t argue, doesn’t reach. But he sees everything. And what he sees in Mark—perhaps what he recognises—is a man still performing his guilt. A man who has built a theology where monsters aren’t to blame, because monsters don’t make themselves. Vincent Miller’s debut performance is astonishingly restrained, and it’s exactly that restraint that makes Mel so hard to look away from. He’s a mirror no one in this place wants to stare into for too long.
On the periphery, watching, circling, waiting, is Warren Murfett. Guy Pearce plays him with the brittle composure of a man who’s survived too much and compromised too often. He’s nearing parole, owes the wrong people favours, and sees in Mel an opportunity. What follows isn’t a thriller, but a slow descent into moral corrosion—a study of how people justify the harm they do when survival is the only thing left on the table.
And that’s the genius of Inside. It doesn’t ask whether these men can change. It asks whether we’d recognise that change if it ever happened—or whether it even matters. It strips away the narrative scaffolding of most prison films and leaves only raw psychology, spiritual ambiguity, and the aching, echoing space where real accountability should live.
The prison is filmed with deliberate restraint: washed-out greys, no stylised grit, no false grandeur. It feels like a holding pattern. A place not for punishment, but for the never-ending limbo of waiting—for release, for forgiveness, for meaning. Williams knows that the real tension isn’t between inmates—it’s between the masks they wear and the selves they can’t escape.
What shook me most wasn’t the violence (though it’s there, lurking in every silence), or the system (though it looms), but the deep, uneasy empathy I felt. Not for the crimes, but for the confusion—the way some men grow up broken, miswired, desperate to rewrite their story with the language they’ve got, however warped. Mark’s theology is frightening, yes, but it’s also heartbreakingly human. It’s the logic of someone who can’t live with what he did and has found a way—however deluded—to keep breathing.
And that’s the unbearable tension of Inside. You feel pulled. You feel judged. You feel complicit. Just when you’re ready to hate a character, the film shows you their weakness. Just when you start to understand them, it reminds you what they’ve done.
There’s no redemption arc here. No catharsis. Just a hollow space where those things might have been, if the world were fairer or more forgiving or less human.
And maybe that’s the point. Some prisons are made of walls. Others are made of stories we tell ourselves, over and over, just to survive the night. Inside is about the men who live there—and the terrifying possibility that sometimes, you can’t leave.
8/10
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