ST. ALi Italian Film Festival 2022 Film Review - The Inner Cage
Images courtesy of the ST. ALi Italian Film Festival.
What’s the closest you can get to post-apocalypse in a completely functional world? Probably a decrepit, old prison set to close but stubbornly clinging to life as 12 lowly inmates wait for their transfers to be finalised. With a skeletal staff of guards left to caretake the leftovers, The Inner Cage feels an awful lot like The Walking Dead in its third season. Not because zombies break out of the closed off wards or anything like that, but besides the shambles of a prison, this film is fuelled off of the minute human interactions between cops and robbers, trying to co-exist despite burgeoning disdain. The human moments eat a lion’s share of screen time in this suspiciously tense feature.
Director Leonardo Di Costanzo spends the entire film toying with the inherent distrust between guards and prisoners, and each additional shred of freedom afforded to the inmates is treated with the utmost caution and concern. This underlying predisposition suspends tension over every interaction as riots, gangfare, and decrepitation lies only a few bad moves away at any time. The backstories of each of these forgotten prisoners are barely spared any light as intrigue props up the personality of about 70 per cent of the cast, which I think works to the favour of The Inner Cage, a movie built off not knowing anything more than ’we’re all here right now, we’re not sure when we’ll leave…’
The inherent suspicion and distrust from us audience, forever in anticipation of some thrilling scene of action, creates an introspective atmosphere as hopefully by the end, - if you have a bit of empathy to spare - you’ll start to question why do we distrust these condemned, so? Questioning the prison system isn’t something I try to do on a lazy Sunday, but Costanzo got me there with their deconstruction of the hierarchy in prison, both in terms of power structures and the contrasts between consciousnesses.
In a film about relationships, respect, uncertainty, and disdain, The Inner Cage subverts typical jailhouse rocks in favour of a character-driven analysis of what happens when someone gets thrown behind bars. What kind of person do they become and can they change? Though many questions are left unanswered when the credits roll, no time is wasted in questioning what it means to be human.
The Inner Cage is screening as part of the 2022 ST. ALi Italian Film Festival which runs 13th September to 16th October. For tickets and more info, click here.