There seems to be a new subgenre of horror/thriller movies emerging of late: ‘Game night gone wrong’. We’ve had the bloody-murder of Bodies Bodies Bodies and the demonic possession of Talk To Me — and now we have the literal mind-bending chaos of It’s What’s Inside, a fun and stylish rethink of body-swap movies. What if, this film posits, instead of two people swapping bodies, as has been traditional — it was eight people?
It has been described as “Clue for Zoomers”, which is not far off the mark. Like Bodies Bodies Bodies and Talk To Me, this is a film made explicitly for and about Generation Z, and deeply considers their obsessions, anxieties and pathologies. It begins in a frantic manner, reflecting the social-media generation’s attention-demanded brains, as Shelby (Brittany O'Grady), our lead, frantically scrolls through her Instagram, bombarded with data and input. She’s dating Cyrus (James Morosini), whose name alone should be a red flag, and who is himself unhealthily doom-scrolling, their relationship teetering.
It’s as if Edgar Wright had a baby with a TikTokker.
The pair are headed for a friendship reunion, to celebrate the wedding of old pal Reuben (Devon Terrell); this is also how we meet Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), their social-media-influencer friend who posts myopic selfies with captions like “About last night”, “Where to this time?” or simply “Outdoors”. But when somewhat estranged acquaintance Forbes (an excellently creepy David W. Thompson) shows up, with a mysterious briefcase containing an outlandish sci-fi body-swap game, everyone begins to lose their minds — or at least, temporarily misplace them.
It is written and directed by Greg Jardin, making his feature debut, a hugely impressive first attempt: dripping with style and invention, edited to within an inch of its life. It begins with some extreme close-up, abstract-macro-photography opening titles, Fight Club-style, and there are clever uses of split-screen, extreme neon lighting, photographic montage flashbacks, acrobatic camera moves, and consistently surprising music choices (from Rossini’s ‘L'italiana in Algeri’ to Charles Williams’ ‘Theme from The Apartment’ to The Walker Brothers). It’s as if Edgar Wright had a baby with a TikTokker.
Jardin’s emphasis on style and verve can feel excessive at times, but for this particular story it doesn’t actually seem out of place. Its excess is the animating engine of the film: a story about the superficiality of the modern world, and the masks we put on. While it’s admittedly not always easy keeping track of who is wearing which body-swapped mask — Jardin sometimes gives us a stylized, red-lit glimpse behind the curtain of who’s who — it is an undeniably compelling, frequently surprising, deeply trippy trip: the Freakiest of Fridays.