Before Willem Dafoe gets locked in for the psychological thriller Inside this Friday, March 17, Focus Features is teaming with the pop culture brand Super Yaki to offer stylish new apparel for the occasion. The new limited edition Super Yaki x Inside line features a "dad hat" and t-shirt sporting the artistic touch of the film. All items are available to pre-order now on Super Yaki's site.
Both items' designs are based on a set of teaser posters Focus previously released to promote the film back in November. The posters, like the film's other promo with a painting of a panicked Dafoe, fully embrace the art-based premise of the film, taking heavy inspiration from the masterful surrealist painter René Magritte and his 1929 masterpiece The Treachery of Images. The shirt shows one of the poster designs featuring a pigeon with the film's title inside its body. Both the shirt and hat also sport the phrase "This is not Willem Dafoe," a reference to the line on Magritte's famed painting which translates to "This is not a pipe." The hat will set you back $30 while the shirt is a bit more at $35.
Inside is a bit of an experimental feature for Dafoe and director Vasilis Katsoupis. Following in the same vein as great films like Castaway and I Am Legend that star only a single actor, the film centers on Nemo (Dafoe), an expert art thief whose latest job goes horribly wrong when he ends up trapped in a New York penthouse with nothing but the priceless works he planned to steal. The trailer showed as he utilized his wit to survive in the high-tech apartment by any means necessary. He slowly goes mad within the penthouse walls, however, and a recent clip saw him deteriorating to the point of conversing with a pigeon.
Inside Gives Dafoe a Chance to Flex His Acting Muscles in a Unique Environment
Katsoupis makes his feature directorial debut with Inside which he co-wrote with Ben Hopkins. It's an ambitious start for the director who spoke to Collider about crafting a cerebral, uncomfortable experience that channels Robinson Crusoe in the confines of a Manhattan apartment. Debuting at the Berlin International Film Festival, it earned solid marks with critics, particularly impressing Collider's own Marco Vito Oddo who gave it an A in his review. He called it a "crowd pleaser," balancing fresh, artistic ideas with another dynamite performance by the legendary Dafoe.
For his part, the actor was pleased to take on the task of acting against an environment rather than other actors. "I suppose the idea is, sometimes it was important to inhabit it, and you had to connect the narrative, and you didn't want to point at it," he told Collider in a recent interview with Collider's Samantha Coley. "It was always... The challenge was to be disciplined, not to indicate anything, and to only deal with what was before us, which was helped greatly by the fact that we were shooting in chronological order, so there was practicality and present-mindedness that really guided us."
Check out the Super Yaki x Inside line ahead of Inside's debut in theaters on March 17. See the trailer below: