Body-swapping movies typically aren’t very scary. On the surface, that seems weird. After all, having your consciousness ripped out of your body and dropped into someone else’s sounds like a downright terrifying experience. But the most popular body-swapping movies like Freaky Friday or The Hot Chick tend to treat this traumatic event as little more than a minor inconvenience.
In 2020, Freaky offered a delicious brew of horror and comedy that riffed on other body-swapping classics. But for the most part, standard horror is typically more interested in having something alien take over your body (see Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Faculty, et cetera) rather than human-on-human swapping. However, one new thriller, currently streaming on Netflix, finds a way to take the classic body-swapping premise and make it downright terrifying.
It’s What’s Inside centers on a group of college friends who reunite for a wedding. The night before the main event, the groom-to-be invites everyone to his family’s mansion to reminisce and get wasted. But the evening takes a turn when their old friend Forbes (David Thompson), whom nobody had seen since graduation, shows up with a mysterious device hidden inside a briefcase.
We soon learn that the device, which Forbes says he invented, is capable of body-swapping any two people (or more). With everyone quickly onboard, the entire group agrees to jump into each other’s bodies. Forbes then suggests a game where the goal is to correctly guess who everybody really is.
The rest of It’s What Inside unfolds quickly from here. The gang plays a quick round and then agrees to a rematch (after that, the device needs to recharge for at least a day). Unsurprisingly, deception quickly becomes the name of the game. Forbes lies about his identity, creating a scenario where he can kiss one of his female friends. One longtime couple quickly find each other and start fighting. Others hook up for the first time.
Without going into spoiler territory, the movie really picks up after a couple of characters wind up dead in the middle of the game. This means some of the group to spend the rest of their lives in somebody else’s body, which adds some tension to the proceedings, to say the least.
While the premise of It’s What’s Inside is clever, the cast holds it back from ever really clicking into place. The movie is full of beautiful up-and-coming actors with millions of Instagram followers. Unfortunately, most of them aren’t up to the challenge of a body-swapping movie. Acting like you’re somebody else inside your body isn’t easy — even if Jamie Lee Curtis makes it look effortless.
It’s What’s Inside tries to cover for this by simply showing us who’s in which body. The camera will sometimes cut between a regular shot and a tinted view where everything is red, meant to reveal the true identity of each body-swapped character. This helps, but it also kind of undoes the whole fun of a body-swapping movie in the first place.
There are some other fun visual flourishes throughout the film. Early on, when the rest of the characters try to remember why Forbes disappeared, they recount one night in college when everything went wrong. As they share and correct their drunken memories, the images onscreen change in a clever depiction of how malleable memory can be.
There’s also a fun twist at the ending, which cleverly recontextualizes the entire movie. However, while I’m pretty sure I was able to follow the plot, by the end there were so many dangling threads that I was struggling to follow along — and, unfortunately, I’m not sure I cared that much either.
