Appearances are dangerously deceiving in It’s What’s Inside, a horror comedy in which youthful insecurities, desires, and resentments lead to dizzying disaster. Premiering on Netflix on Oct. 4 following its acclaimed bow at the Sundance Film Festival, writer/director Greg Jardin’s feature debut cares far less about scares than thrills, and it generates plenty of giddy ones as it mires its characters in a predicament of head-spinning proportions.
Aimed at a twentysomething crowd in both style and substance, and best seen with as little prior knowledge as possible, it’s an inventively loopy ride that gets entertaining mileage out of the fantasy of walking in someone else’s shoes—at least, for a brief time.
Moving at the same pace that its heroine scrolls through her social media accounts—which is depicted on-screen via rapid-fire split-screen cuts—It’s What’s Inside feels like it’s hopped up on too many Red Bulls, and that hyperactivity is central to its flip-flopping story.
Shelby (The Consultant’s Brittany O’Grady) surprises her boyfriend Cyrus (James Morosini) by donning a wig and lingerie and enticing him with, “Oh hey, cutie,” the catchphrase of their classmate-turned-Instagram celebrity Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), whom Cyrus not-so-secretly craves. No matter the effort, her seduction fails miserably. However, a more elaborate bout of role-playing is in their future once they arrive at the wedding of Reuben (Devon Terrell), who’s invited many of their pals to hang out the night before the nuptials, including Nikki, tattooed trust fund braggart Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood), pothead Maya (Nina Bloomgarden), and affectionate Brooke (Reina Hardesty).
At Reuben’s mansion, the group is joined, surprisingly, by Forbes (David W. Thompson), who was kicked out of school following a party at which he fought Dennis and was busted for supplying alcohol to his younger sister (Madison Davenport).
Forbes has been working on the West Coast in technology, and he shows up with a mysterious suitcase in hand. Turning down the booze and blunts that are being consumed by everyone else, Forbes proposes that they play a unique game. Rather than explain it, he simply has them experience it first-hand by opening the suitcase to reveal a device—full of lights and switches—that has electrodes which they all place on their temples. When he turns the gizmo on, their minds are blown, and It’s What’s Inside kicks into frenzied gear.
(Warning: Some spoilers ahead.)
As these individuals simultaneously learn, Forbes and his “team” have created an honest-to-goodness body-swapping device, and their astonished excitement is echoed by Jardin’s aesthetics. The director’s camera whirls about until everything goes hazy, his frame divides into up to eight separate quadrants, and his action zips about, drops into slow motion, and is routinely drenched in lurid, pulsating Dario Argento-esque colors. It’s What’s Inside is aggressively flashy, its formal brashness in service of its up-is-down energy, and even as things become more wildly twisted, its momentum never flags. While its showmanship can occasionally be a tad derivative, it’s also confident and electrifying, and always in tune with its protagonists’ internal and external crises.
Forbes hasn’t brought his magical thingamajig just to impress his compatriots with a parlor trick; rather, he proposes that they play a game. The concept is simple: Everyone will switch bodies (he’ll be the gamemaster who knows their true identities) and then try to guess who everyone else is, with Polaroid portraits used to mark them once they’ve been found out.
Shelby is reticent to participate, and with good reason, since as soon as this contest begins, the evening goes from playful to perilous, with Cyrus (in Reuben) getting hot and heavy with Maya (in Nikki). Secret desires are rife amongst these friends, and at least initially, it appears that Forbes is taking great pleasure in not-so-subtly pulling their strings in order to sever their bonds—because, perhaps, he’s still bitter about the years-earlier incident that cost him so much?
It’s What’s Inside hints at such explanations yet it barrels forward at such a breakneck speed that most of one’s energy is spent trying to delineate who’s who. Jardin facilitates that process by dramatizing scenes both as they look and how they really are, the latter seen in red-and-black cutaways that help keep things straight, and the film’s giddy kicks come from its screwy, entangled reality. By the second round of Forbes’ game, it’s clear that not every friend is being upfront about their true nature and, more importantly, their conniving motives. An ensuing accident further ups the bewildering ante, bestowing these revelers with an epic-sized problem and, additionally, a unique opportunity for clarity, revenge, and rebirth.
Round and round It’s What’s Inside goes until, finally, it just about flies off the rails. The director, though, never loses his grip on the material, continually adding complications—including a ticking clock-style deadline for this scenario to be resolved—until the proceedings achieve requisite mind-f— status.
Given its game-gone-awry premise, the film faintly recalls last year’s Talk to Me. However, whereas that hit mired itself in teen trauma, Jardin’s maiden effort features a giant illuminated “TRAUMA” sign but eschews heaviness. Instead, its most serious concern is Shelby and Cyrus’ romantic dynamic, and even that is handled with whiplash verve—as is Shelby’s anger and jealousy regarding Nikki, a picture-perfect blonde whose desirability she can’t match.
It’s What’s Inside plumbs young adults’ yearning for reinvention, only to posit it as terrifyingly foolhardy, and the lengths to which it mixes and matches its characters is consistently amusing. At a certain point, the film self-consciously winks at its audience via a blistering diagrammatic sequence that lays out various potential mind-body combinations. Yet it never pats itself or its audience on the back, too busy is it concocting more disorienting dilemmas. Once he dials the mayhem to 11, Jardin never turns it back down, racing to and fro in a setting whose outlandish artistic embellishments (a 360-degree mirrored room; a hallway with an ice-like sculpture on its ceiling) contribute to its trippiness.
Considering that it’s going straight to Netflix, It’s What’s Inside will never be a midnight-madness sensation. Still, it’s no small consolation prize to become a teen sleepover staple, which seems likely to be its destiny.
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