Crew
Director/Screenplay/Visual Effects – Greg Jardin, Producers – Kate Andrews, Jason Baum, Raul Domingo & William Rosenfeld, Photography – Kevin Fletcher, Music – Andrew Hewitt, Visual Effects Supervisor – Przemyslaw Drosik, Special Effects Supervisor – Conor Wing, Production Design – Terry Watson. Production Company – Such Productions/Edith Productions/Boldly Go Productions.
Cast
Brittany O’Grady (Shelby Jansen), James Morosini (Cyrus Baum), David Thompson (Forbes Blomquist), Alycia Debnam-Carey (Nikki Vee), Devon Terrell (Reuben), Reina Hardesty (Brooke), Nina Bloomgarden (Maya Wilson), Gavin Leatherwood (Dennis Markowitz), Madison Davenport (Beatrice Blomquist)
Plot
A group of former college friends arrive at Reuben’s mansion the day before his wedding to Maya. Upon arriving, they learn that Reuben has invited Forbes Blomquist, who used to be part of their friend circle. Forbes was expelled from college over an incident where he invited his underage sister to a party but subsequently went on to become a successful tech entrepreneur. After arriving, Forbes shows them a device he has developed that can switch their personalities into each other’s bodies. He persuades them to try out the device. They marvel at the results and make a game out of trying to guess who is in each person’s body. On the second round, Reuben who is in Dennis’s body, takes Brooke, who is in Maya’s body, up on the balcony to make out, only for it to collapse and they fall to their deaths. When the others realise that some of them are now trapped unable to get back to their original bodies, dark secrets the group holds start to come out.
It’s What’s Inside was a feature film debut for director Greg Jardin who has spent most of the 2010s directing music video. I began to hate the film from the moment it opened. We meet one of the central characters (Alycia Debnam-Carey) who is a social media influencer and the film starts in in a fast-paced montage of Tik Tok videos and message threads, all with an infuriatingly upbeat happening buzz. If there is anything designed to switch someone over the age of 22 off from the outset, it is opening a film like this. Even after we are introduced to them, the group all seem such a self-absorbed and unlikeable bunch that you wish that this was a Slasher Film so you could at least have the vicarious pleasure of seeing them killed off.
It’s What’s Inside is a bodyswap film. There has been a long line of these, mostly in the vein of light fantasy efforts, going back to the 1940s where we usually get a man and a woman, an adult and a child, or two people from differing social positions swap bodies with one another. See the likes of Turnabout (1940), Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941) and Angel on My Shoulder (1946). The 1980s bought a revival of the bodyswap genre with a spate of films such as Like Father Like Son (1987), Big (1988), Vice Versa (1988), 18 Again (1988) and Dream a Little Dream (1989) – see Bodyswap and Identity Exchange Films. There have been a smaller number of these where the process is due to a science-fictional device, as it is here, with the likes of the Star Trek episode Turnabout Intruder (1969) and the films La Machine (1994) and Possessor (2020).
All bodyswap films are predicated on two (or more as here) different characters ending up in the other’s body where it becomes about two opposites trying to deal with the other’s circumstances. The problem with It’s What’s Inside is that by the point that the device is introduced 31 minutes in, we have been given no sense of any of the eight characters as distinct individuals. About all we are given is one or two word descriptions – Alycia Debnam-Carey is the social media influencer, David Thompson is a tech guru, Nina Bloomgarden is a New Age hippy type, Devon Terrell is getting married and I honestly couldn’t remember anything distinguishing about any of the others. When it is hard to tell the characters one from another, you run into a big problem doing this type of film where the actors are being required to play different people. This is a film that would have worked far better if instead of vapid millennials it had been cast with the typical complement of say an Agatha Christie thriller, each of whom is a distinctive character with their own story.
It is not until the one-hour point that It’s What’s Inside starts to get interesting. Here it gets into games of people guessing who is in whose body where some among the group are not telling the truth, before the jolt twist where two of the characters end up falling through a balcony railing and being impaled on wrought iron spikes, leaving the rest of them wondering what to do. The scenario then turns into the others fighting over returning to their bodies and the vexing question of how do people go back when their original body is dead and what happens to the two leftover souls/bodies. And then there come further twists with one of the girls refusing to return to her body and then another big twist on everything right at the end.
The problem gets to be that it becomes hard to work out who is meant to be in whose body. I frequently ended up losing track for the simple reason that it was difficult to tell characters apart even before they changed. And then there are multiple twists that come on this when people change around a second time or are pretending to be someone else.
I also majorly hated the ending of It’s What’s Inside where it seems perfectly acceptable for one of the guys to be condemned to a life sentence in jail. For one, the film never clearly specifies how it is that the two deaths, which are clearly accidental, end up being pinned on him as opposed to any of the others. And moreover, he is sentenced to life in prison solely for making the suggestion that he was okay with the idea of a girl living her life in someone else’s body because he desired the other body. Insensitive maybe, but worthy of a life sentence?
Trailer here