Photo: Courtesy of Netflix
What happens when a group of college friends with unprocessed baggage reunite for a pre-wedding party where one of them brought a magic body-swapping machine? In It’s What’s Inside, you get an absolute mess. Netflix’s coked-up, neon-tinted new horror movie, which first premiered in Sundance Film Festival’s Midnight selection this January, is an instant-classic entry into the “party games from hell” subgenre. But as trippy as this film certainly is, it could’ve been even freakier if it had resisted the allure of a fun but unnecessary final-act twist.
From the moment we meet our ill-fated college buds, it’s clear they’re in for a terrible time. Our central couple, Cyrus (James Morosini) and Shelby (Brittany O’Grady), are a relationship nightmare: He’s masturbating to an influencer while she’s supposed to be out for a run, and meanwhile, she’s in the bathroom making herself look just like that same influencer (whose persona she clearly envies) before surprising him with sex. Too bad Shelby catches Cyrus and his screen, which casts an awful funk over their drive to the reunion party. When they arrive, we find out that the influencer is actually their friend Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), who is also in attendance. Woof.
If you can believe it, the awkwardness only intensifies from there. Reuben (Devon Terrell), the groom-to-be who’s gathered all his friends at his late mother’s house, has a crush on one of his guests, the wannabe hippie Maya (Nina Bloomgarden). Brooke (Reina Hardesty), the artsy one, is fawning over Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood), the stereotypical fuckboy. And back in college, Dennis hooked up with the high-school-aged younger sister of the creepy nerd Forbes (David Thompson) — who got expelled from the school after authorities found out that he got that same younger sister drunk at the party where she hooked up with Dennis (who, by the way, was dating Nikki at the time).
Phew! So, given all this, erm, history, why does anyone in this group think it’d be a good idea to switch bodies? The first time around, they don’t know what they’re doing; Forbes shows up late with this new, top-secret invention he and his “team” have been working on, plugs them all in, and surprises them with the out-of-body experience of a lifetime. The rush is apparently so fun that they just have to try it again. Then, Forbes introduces his favorite party game: Everyone swaps bodies and tries to guess who’s who. Cyrus figures out that Forbes is up to no good when he realizes that Forbes lied about which body he’s jumped into during the first round of the game. This foreshadows the twist to come: Forbes isn’t even Forbes. It turns out, it’s his sister, Beatrice (Madison Davenport), who stole his body to get her revenge after that awful night in college, and the lies the group told afterward, got her sent to a mental hospital.
Putting aside the stickiness of using the age-old “mental hospital” trope — a beloved, if dated hallmark of the horror genre — the real issue with this twist is that it robs us of even more potential drama. It’s What’s Inside does a brilliant job of establishing the interpersonal weirdness of this friend group during their body-swapping shenanigans, and really, it would be even more shocking to find out partway through the proceedings that Beatrice is catfishing as her brother. When shoehorned into the end, the revelation feels a bit more like a last-minute shrug than the stunning game-changer it really is.
We do get some foreshadowing throughout the film that “Forbes” is not playing an honest game. When he first shows up, he seems oddly quiet, offering only tight-lipped smiles while everyone spews their life stories at him. We’re meant to assume that Forbes is just an off-putting, Zuckerbergian kind of dude, but retrospectively, his sinister silence makes even more sense. Then, “Forbes” takes Dennis’s body during the first round of the body-swap game while making everyone think he’s in Reuben’s. In the next round, Forbes actually does take Reuben’s body to further throw people off the scent. And finally, when shit really starts hitting the fan, Forbes (a.k.a. Beatrice) coaches Shelby on how to successfully deceive everyone and manipulate the game for her own benefit.
Beyond its dramatic plot and fraught character history, It’s What’s Inside has the most fun with its stylistic tricks. Before everything goes down, Brooke shows her friends some sketches she’s done that appear different through various color filters — and when everyone swaps, we occasionally see the real person lurking inside their friend’s body through different light filters. Certain hidden crushes only come out after people have switched and start making out in one another’s hijacked bodies. One of these hook-ups, between Brooke and Reuben (inside Dennis and Maya’s bodies) turns deadly when they fall off a crumbling balcony. The chaotic climax begins when everyone finds out that at least two people can’t return to their old, now dead, bodies. Whose will everyone take?
As it exists, the movie centers its suspense around Shelby trying to usurp Nikki’s body for good because she’s realized that Cyrus is crazy about her. We only find out that Beatrice was Forbes in the aftermath. But what if we knew that detail a little sooner — say, from the time the second body-swap round begins? That would add even more suspense as viewers wonder what the hell she’s done to Forbes, whether he’s still alive, and whom she’s come to kill: Dennis, Nikki, both of them, or everyone.
If done right, revealing the switcheroo earlier could also lend some much-needed dimension to Beatrice, whose characterization feels two-dimensional at best. Sure, it’s somewhat satisfying that Shelby’s decided to let Cyrus take the fall for their friends’ deaths and rot in hell in jail for lying to her about being into Nikki. But how are we meant to feel when we discover that Beatrice has driven away in Nikki’s body with the machine in tow? The film frames this as a triumph, with a smirk on Beatrice’s face and her new body’s long, gorgeous hair blowing in the breeze, but given how briefly (and glancingly) we’ve known Beatrice, the moment feels empty. It’s hard to shake the feeling that this intoxicating trip could’ve gotten us even higher.
