The curtains open to the screeching of tires, a crunch of metal, the shattering of glass and the dripping of blood – a little gentle foreshadowing to contrast the relentless tension to follow in Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s À L'INTERIEUR.

Four months after the tragic car accident that claimed the life of her husband, the very pregnant Sarah (Alysson Paradis, sister of French pop idol Vanessa Paradis) is relaxing alone in her suburban house on Christmas Eve, waiting for her mother to take her to the hospital where her doctor will induce labour. The silent night is broken by a knock on the door as a woman (BETTY BLUE’s Beatrice Dalle) calmly asks to use the phone. Immediately suspicious, Sarah refuses to let the stranger in and calls the police, who find no trace of the woman when they arrive. When they depart, Sarah locks the door, unwittingly trapping herself in a jealous maternal struggle for the survival of the new life within her belly. Sarah must fight back against a scissor-wielding madwoman hell-bent on taking one thing away from her…

Hailed by Fangoria horror film critic Alan Jones as “the goriest film since Peter Jackson’s DEAD ALIVE,” À L'INTERIEUR is a fresh work of Caesarean terror that reaches beyond the current American horror trend of SAW or HOSTEL. Maury and Bustillo, like HAUTE TENSION’s director/writer team of Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, are die-hard genre fans – and their passion shows. À L'INTERIEUR also shares HAUTE TENSION’s editor Baxter and composer François-Eudes Chanfrault, responsible respectively for jackknife edits and a pulsating score that hits nerve-shattering notes. Dalle’s insane menace and Paradis’s determined survival involve highly physical and exhausting performances. They drive the narrative forward with gut-wrenching force, tapping into , a primal fright factor.

Sitting in the dark, you’ll wonder whether those are contractions, or simply the hyperactive beating of your heart, trapped in the madness that is À L'INTERIEUR. It’s too late to call the midwife, because the water has broken, the contractions of terror have begun and the blood is flowing… (Colin Geddes, Midnight Madness, TIFF)

Scott Weinberg's Cinematical review is HERE.