The movie Inside is just brilliantly intense. It’s about a pregnant widow who is stalked and eventually attacked by a mysterious woman that wants to take her baby. Now, allow me to be absolutely clear here: when I say the intruder wants to take her baby, I mean that she quite literally wants to take her baby. With scissors. If that’s not a great premise for a horror film, I don’t know what is. And Inside is more than just a great premise — it’s a damn good movie.

Inside tugs on many of the same strings as John Carpenter’s Halloween, weaving a narrative that’s loaded to the brim with suspense. In many ways, it feels like the film’s spiritual successor, arriving at long last to pick up where Halloween left off. The ends are different but the means, you’ll find, are just the same. Co-directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo deserve all the credit in the world here, because Inside is a true achievement. It hit me, just as it will surely hit you, with that all-too-familiar-but-largely-lost punch that horror films should pack: when the last few minutes were rolling, it was both hard to look away from and hard to look at the screen. It’s an enthralling, engrossing, and occasionally sickening film, and it’s one you need to see.